Interventions in Education Systems: Reform and Development 9781472593375, 9781472526069, 9781472524232

Citation preview

Interventions in Education Systems

Also available from Bloomsbury Comparative and International Education, David Phillips and Michele Schweisfurth Global Education Policy and International Development, edited by Antoni Verger, Mario Novelli and Hülya Kosar Altinyelken Globalization and International Education, Robin Shields Reinventing the Curriculum, edited by Mark Priestley and Gert Biesta

Interventions in Education Systems Reform and Development David Scott, Charles Posner, Chris Martin and Elsa Guzman

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © David Scott, Charles Posner, Chris Martin and Elsa Guzman, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. David Scott, Charles Posner, Chris Martin and Elsa Guzman have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2606-9 PB: 978-1-4742-9356-3 ePDF: 978-1-4725-2423-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-2429-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scott, David. Interventions in education systems reform and development / David Scott, Charles Posner, Chris Martin, and Elsa Guzman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-2606-9 1. School improvement programs–Case studies. I. Posner, Charles. II. Martin, Chris. III. Guzman, Elsa. IV. Title. LB2822.8.S38 2014 371.2’07–dc23 2014028817

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Education Reforms

1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Implementation Myopia Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems A History of International Organizations in Education Corporative Change in Mexico Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System Statism and the Singapore Model Finland’s Educational Revolution

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work Notes References Author Index Subject Index

11 35 53 85 111 129 143 157 177 193 209 214

Acknowledgements An abridged version of Scott, D. (2011) ‘PISA, International Comparisons, Epistemic Paradoxes’, in M. Pereyra, H-G. Kottoff and R. Cowen (eds), PISA under Examination: Changing Knowledge, Changing Tests and Changing Schools. The Hague: SENSE Publishers appears in Chapter 4, for which permission has been received from the publisher. This book is dedicated to Lucas Scott, Robin Scott, Luis Bojalil Jaber and Carol Muñoz Izquierdo. Our thanks for various contributions to the overall project go to Rodolfo Ramírez, Margarita Zorrila, Bonifacio Barba, Martín Ortiz, Sylvia Schmelkes, Alba Martínez Olivé, Oscar Alvarez-M, Karin Zotzmann, Alexia Demetriou, Felix Alvarez, Richard Andrews, Jenny Houssart, Sue DaleTunnicliffe, María Cárdenas Ayala, Laura Flores Arce, Omar Lomelí Guzmán, Zulma Medina Carillo, Milton Romano Montes, Norma Galván Meza, Sofía González Basilio, Aldo Zea Verdín, Carlos Castrejón Camargo, Raquel Medina Carillo, Ivette Sierra Rodríguez, Salvador Vázquez Sánchez and the members of the Consejo Nacional Indígena e Intercultural, Educación y Cambio, Contracorriente and Movimiento para la Innovación y la Transformación de la Educación Primaria.

Introduction: Education Reforms

Based on our experiences in four very different countries, Mexico, England, Singapore and Finland, our intention in this book is to provide an explanation for the way education systems can and do change. There is a plethora of theoretical models that in attempting to deal with causal relations between a system’s elements usually conclude that there are socio-economic and cultural constraints to implementing education reforms; however, these models largely remain at an abstract level and come to very general conclusions that are not of particular help to practitioners in the field. The contemporary field has generated sets of models that can be distilled to four different types for reforming education systems: a top-down model, a market-driven model, a professional development model and a social participation model. The problem here is twofold: first, there is a tendency to try to fit reality into these models, and secondly, the models are too abstract to be entirely useful. How appropriate are they? How can they help in providing descriptions and explanations of education systems? And how can we evaluate these models? These questions can only be answered after examining what happens in practice and having a spectrum of cases to investigate. Equally, we know of large numbers of programmes and projects (cf. Sarason 1990) that have sought to change educational policies and practices. However, they are not known for their longevity or are never put into practice. They show little understanding of the role of social structures in encouraging or impeding change, even if these vary from country to country. However, they do have a direct and, perhaps, more insidiously, an indirect effect on the development of policies and practices. Over the last three decades a significant number of texts have been produced seeking to relate educational institutions, policies, practices and reforms to social structures and agencies (cf. Parsons 1964; Wallerstein 1984; Boudon 1984; and Archer 2013).1 And in addition, a number of frameworks have been developed that have become the basis for attempting to understand the complex relation between education and society (e.g., Bernstein2 1971, 1973, 1975, 1990; and Bourdieu 2005). On the whole many of these works are abstract and the fit often seems more circumstantial than causal, often derived

2

Interventions in Education Systems

from ideal types rather than empirical data. However, it is important to see how the relationships between education systems, practices, social systems and events can make sense for practitioners and theorists, and how they can serve as a basis for a meaningful strategy for educational reform. At the same time national and international bodies, whose self-imposed task is to improve educational performance, seem to be writing in a void in that there is no rigorous theory guiding their work and their documents exhibit little or no reference to groups, people and institutions that can impede or promote the programmes and projects they favour. These agents provide their clients with lists of recommendations but with little or no clarity about how and under what conditions these proposals can be put into effect. Normally when a government decides to reform its education system, or any other public service for that matter, it begins by examining what is on offer and then selects what fits best in relation to its political leanings and the various constraints within which it operates. Although it is important to distinguish these approaches in order to clarify their potential to reach particular educational goals, their incarnation in real-life settings is what determines what happens in the final instance. Thus social participation in the United Kingdom during the 1980s had different meanings and outcomes to that experienced in Nicaragua in the same period (cf. Fitzgerald 2000). Sometimes policies may grow organically out of previous ones or cohere easily with others in other sectors, but elsewhere they may be superimposed on, or make a sharp break with, what previously existed, and may be assembled in an incoherent fashion, clashing with other education or economic policies, such as in Mexico during the Calderón administration (2006–12). Currently on offer, as we have suggested above, are four basic approaches to educational reform. The first of these is a top-down model. Governments stipulate the types of judgement that should be made about the successful delivery of educational policies and about how this should be achieved. They have the resources to impose these reforms on the system, though this is rarely achieved in practice in ways that policymakers intended. The reason for this is that reform processes are generally multidirectional rather than unidirectional. Policy texts and directives issued by governments always allow amendments and changes to be made at every stage of the process and at every level (including the stages of implementation). This more fluid model of policy better reflects the relationship between policy development and implementation. A variant on this is an evaluative state model where the state withdraws from the precise

Introduction: Education Reforms

3

implementation of policy though it clearly has an important role in framing that policy. It sets up a series of semi-independent bodies whose purpose is to ensure that institutions and individuals conform to government directives. These semi-independent bodies have a role in interpreting government policy and subsequently enforcing these policies by imposing sanctions on institutions and individuals if they do not conform. The reform process is carried out by quasigovernment agencies at arm’s length from governments. This is still, however, very much a top-down reform model. A second type is the quasi-market model. Here, governments decide to withdraw directly from the formation and implementation of policy, and set up quasi-market systems which hand power to the consumer, thus putting pressure on educational institutions by either exercising or threatening to exercise powers of voice or exit (Hirschman 1970).3 If in the latter case too much of this takes place, then this threatens the survival of the organization. The market is a quasimarket, not least because some groups of consumers have a greater capacity to exercise voice or exit, and therefore have a greater degree of cultural capital and can display and use it more effectively than other people. A third reform model is the professional development model. Here it is thought that different types of decisions within a system should be made by different people, because at the level at which they operate they are more likely to have the required expertise for making such decisions. Professional interests therefore drive this reform process. The final model is the social participation model, and the principle underpinning this is that since there are no conclusive ways of determining the correctness of particular sets of values, decisions within education systems have to be made through negotiations between the various stakeholders. This means that no stakeholder has a monopoly of power over any other, or can claim a special status, but the various partners negotiate with each other and come to an agreed solution. What this also means is that the method for reaching agreement has to be in some ideal sense divested of those power relations which privilege one stakeholder over another. Our four national cases, Finland, England, Mexico and Singapore, provide comparisons and contrasts in the adoption of these policy models, though it should be understood that these ideal models reflect general directions of travel rather than precise accounts of what happens in practice. For example, a country such as England over a 20-year period has attempted to reform the system by adopting a judicious mix of the first two policy approaches. Furthermore, the adoption of these approaches is only part of the story. The way these countries

4

Interventions in Education Systems

were transformed in the implementation process is the other part, and for us, the part that is neglected by policymakers and academics. In order to understand implementation better, we therefore, in the first instance, make a broad classification of our country cases.

Four contrasting country cases There are large variations in how reforms are conceived and put together. Apart from the chance or not of their assemblage and the degree of continuity from the past, there are two other considerations. First, reforms can be conceptualized along a continuum between the opaque and the transparent. That is, conceptualization can be either a process that is relatively open and transparent or relatively closed. And secondly, the relationship between conceptualization and implementation varies enormously. These two elements are possibly crucial in determining educational success and failure and for that reason a full account needs to be given as to how these four countries sought to reform their education systems. Finland is a small homogeneous country resonant of mechanical solidarity,4 with strong social cohesiveness and a relatively transparent bureaucracy, with planning and implementation processes open and governed by collective debate. There are significant variations between social groups and their influence on policy and practice, but the relative homogeneity of the population attenuates these. Moreover, under such conditions the perceived nature of, and relationship between, processes of selection and control means that the essence of the society itself is never called into question. England is a much larger entity with more significantly marked differences between social groups and their access to policy-making. As in Finland there is no need to use educational policy to create a national model, and policymakers and practitioners can concentrate on issues of, and processes relating to, selection and control, with nation building not of particular significance. The country as a whole, and a service provision such as education, is run and integrated according to open bureaucratic principles. Debate and procedures seem to be relatively straightforward, unlike more patrimonial societies where nation building is a priority. An increasingly heterogeneous population and cultural norms challenge uniform notions of nationhood, though these differences are worked out more through public debate and consequently the adoption of pluralist policies rather than the power brokering that occurs in patron–client societies.

Introduction: Education Reforms

5

Singapore’s education system is characterized by a strong statist orientation, a belief that the state needs to have command of the types of skills, knowledge and dispositions of its population, and that this is needed to create the conditions for the successful delivery of a market economy, an initial emphasis on nation building, an instrumentalist curriculum and traditional, strongly insulated, curriculum practices.5 These characteristics are common to all the different reform phases of the education system in this country. Mexico is a relatively large and very diverse or heterogeneous society where much educational time is spent trying to create a nation and where educational planning is a much more complex procedure. This is because it is based on underlying patron–client relations within a corporatist state where all negotiations are channelled through vertical bonds of loyalty and obligation, the giving and taking of favours. To some extent these practices exist in all bureaucracies, but in Mexico these practices predominate and are immune from public scrutiny, even while operating in an apparently modern public administration. Selection therefore becomes subordinated to the vested interests of the elites and control is exercised through granting or denying access to resources and services that they hold by virtue of their position in the rentier state.6 At the same time the elites are drawn, by their relations with international organizations, particularly funders, towards administrative reform and moving into line internationally recognized systems of selection and control. This trend often comes into conflict with patron–client practices. Moreover, because of the system of control, power is not as diffuse as it is in the case of Finland or England, but concentrated in the hands of decision-taking elites, and hence it is personalized, with decision-making becoming more dependent upon individuals because there is no institutional basis for devolved systems of decision-making. This means that there is no easy and straightforward path for reforming the system and this could be an important element that needs to be explored if one wishes to account for the fact that client-based societies tend to find it difficult to implement reform programmes successfully (cf. Posner, 2002; Ornelas, 2011).

Education reforms Education systems around the world are constantly reforming themselves, with the initiative for these reforms coming from a number of sources. For example, governments may want to differentiate themselves from their opposition parties or they may genuinely operate through different ideological frameworks to these

6

Interventions in Education Systems

opposition parties or they may want to give expression to their constituents’ demands for a variety of political and socio-economic reasons. Reforms may be a response to the growing globalization of education policy so that national education systems seek to modify their programmes to improve their rankings on international comparative assessments such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) programme (OECD 2014). National imperatives reflecting local economic and cultural priorities act to motivate reform efforts. In short, there are a number of reasons as to why governments promote reforms in their education systems. Sometimes these reforms are very narrowly based, focusing as they do on closing the gap in student performance on literacy and mathematics tests. The reform agenda may be too ambitious in its scope, such as when it addresses pedagogy and assessment, curriculum, school organization and administrative leadership, as well as support mechanisms at a system-wide level. Equally, the reform process may be ill-defined, or too ‘vague and vacuous’, repeating tired epithets such as ‘world-class education’ and ‘world-class performance’ (Hargreaves 2010: 76). Reforms, or interventions by governments or other stakeholders in education systems, are complex and multifaceted processes. The central focus of this book is how these various reform models work in practice, and with what effects. An example of a reform process is that undertaken in England over the last 25 years by successive governments of different political persuasion, each of which in turn has adopted different combinations of top-down statist, evaluative and quasi-market elements. The main features of these reforms have been high-stakes testing and external forms of control and accountability. Education professionals at all levels are required to provide numerical evidence to show how they perform, and this is expressed as indicators of effectiveness. Rewards and sanctions based on these numerical indicators have created pressure on school managers and teachers. The expectations and roles of school principals and teachers are reduced to targets and numbers, instead of the quality of teaching and the quality of the learning experience. School principals increasingly see themselves as managers who interpret and manipulate these numbers. Teachers teach curriculum content that is relevant to standardized testing, focusing on improving test results. The curriculum is narrowed while students are drilled to master tests. Comparison and hierarchy based on test scores in schools demoralizes less successful children and reduces the value of learning from making mistakes. This dissuades schools from

Introduction: Education Reforms

7

long-term improvement processes as it ‘places people in a high-alert dependency mode jumping from one solution to another in a desperate attempt to comply’ (Fullan 2005: 11). This technocratic school culture disengages teachers from high-quality teaching and a commitment to shared practice. England’s high-stakes and external accountability model can be contrasted with the experience of policy implementers and reformers in Finland, where the model adopted conforms more to the professional development and partnership approaches set out above. Darling-Hammond’s (2009: 15) analysis of how Finland, a country that was not succeeding educationally in the 1970s, developed to a world-class system (as indicated in PISA league tables – OECD 2008a, 2010a, 2014) can serve as an example since it ‘started with very little, and purposefully built highly productive and equitable systems, sometimes almost from scratch, in the space of only two to three decades’. Forty years ago the Finnish system was dominated by bureaucracy, reproduced socio-economic inequalities and produced low-quality education, and it gradually introduced curriculum reforms in the 1970s that transformed the system into a modern, publicly financed and devolved education system with widespread equity, good quality and high participation, all of this at a reasonable cost. In addition to the gains in measured achievement, there have been huge gains in educational attainment at the upper secondary and college levels. More than 99 per cent of students now successfully complete compulsory basic education, and about 90 per cent complete upper secondary school. Two-thirds of these graduates enrol in universities or professionally oriented polytechnic schools. And over 50 per cent of the Finnish adult population participates in adulteducation programmes. Ninety-eight per cent of the costs of education at all levels are covered by government, rather than by private sources. Not only is there little variation in achievement across Finnish schools, but the overall variation in achievement among Finnish students is also smaller than that of nearly all the other OECD countries. This is true despite the fact that immigration from nations with lower levels of education has increased sharply in recent years, and there is more linguistic and cultural diversity in schools. By 2006, Finland’s between-school variance on the PISA Science scale was only 5 per cent, whereas the average between-school variance in other OECD nations was about 33 per cent (Sahlberg 2007). Large between-school variation is generally related to social inequality, including both the differences in achievement across neighbourhoods differentiated by wealth and the extent to which schools are funded and organized to reduce or expand inequalities.

8

Interventions in Education Systems

The core principles of the Finnish system include the following: a common curriculum throughout the entire system; teacher education extended through research-based Master’s degree programmes7; teachers and schools making decisions about what and how to teach autonomously, with little interference by the central education administration; no external standardized tests used to rank students or schools; resources for those who need them most, including health and dental care, special education services and transportation to schools; and high standards and support for special needs students. Darling-Hammond’s (1997, 2008, 2009; and Rothman 2011) argument is particularly convincing because she compares the strategies Finland had adopted within the last two decades with those the US government pursued in the same time span with exactly the opposite effects. The US education system effectively moved from a world-class standard to a poorly ranked one that perpetuates socio-economic inequalities and has an extensive wastage of teachers at an initial stage of their career. While Finland ‘has shifted from a highly centralized system emphasizing external testing to a more localized system in which highly trained teachers design curricula around the very lean national standards’ (ibid.: 37) accompanied by equitable funding, the United States has deregulated and partly privatized their school system, downgraded teachers’ capacity for innovation and problem solving, and effectively standardized the curriculum by enforcing frequent external and high-stakes tests upon schools and students that rewards and sanctions students, teachers and schools. Darling-Hammond (2009: 40) goes onto suggest that ‘(t)he focus on instruc­ tion and the development of professional practice in Finland’s approach to organizing the education system has led, according to all reports, to an increased prevalence of effective teaching methods in schools’. Furthermore, efforts to enable schools to learn from each other have led to what Fullan and Hargreaves (1996) call ‘lateral capacity building’, the widespread adoption of effective practices and experimentation with innovative approaches across the system. The reforms initiated in Finland over a period of 25 years are modelled on those partnership and professional development models described above. In Mexico, education reforms, which had many of the same characteristics, had a different trajectory. In Mexico a number of factors sidetracked the hoped for implementation of this model. The collusion between the education administration and the national teachers’ union, the largest in Latin America, blocked the removal of institutional rigidities that impeded more thoroughgo­ing professionalization and fuller participation by a broader range of stakeholders.

Introduction: Education Reforms

9

Furthermore, the thrust of this professional development reform contradicted other concurrent policy initiatives, most notably the new high-impact tests (Evaluación Nacional Del Logro Académico en Centros Escolares – ENLACE8) that were increasingly the driving force of educational policy at this time, connected as these were to both student and teacher evaluation. Thus the professionalization contemplated by its original champions became mired in institutional and policy cross-currents. In contrast, in Singapore, the professional development model that was enacted was delivered through state-sponsored processes of curriculum reform. And this meant that it had a better chance of succeeding in its original form. At the end of this book, we provide a summary and evaluation of our four models for reforming education systems: the top-down model, the market-driven model, the professional development model and the social participation model. We also develop a framework for explaining how education systems function and how reform interventions work. In doing this, and throughout the pages of this book, we problematize the generic term, system. This is important, as it allows us to focus on the central issue concerning interventions and experiments in these education systems for the purposes of improvement and reform, which can be expressed in terms of three questions: What types of judgements9 should be made about such systems? How do these systems work in practice? And how could and should these systems be reformed, if at all? We now move on to examine three issues which are central to the argument we are making in this book: the role of the state in systems’ reform processes (Chapter 1), internal relations of education systems (Chapter 2) and external influences on education systems (Chapter 3).

1

Implementation Myopia

Following the end of World War II, the need for economic reconstruction in Europe and the requirements of national liberation movements in Africa and Asia encouraged the view that education was a key component of national development and nation building. Not only was the ethos one that lent itself readily to notions of human capital theory, but academia, schooled in its common sense assumptions, was also drafted in to provide better systems of curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. This was accomplished through the development of new programmes and policies fostered by official institutions, designed to achieve those ends. From that time we see a proliferation of national, multinational and international bodies dedicated to providing the research that was required to develop relevant policies and programmes. However, the process of implementation, or, in the eyes of the architects of the new education, the lack of implementation, was a very serious problem. As long ago as 1988 George Psacharopoulos (1988) writing about East Africa bemoaned the failure of a number of policy initiatives ranging from combining education and production at the primary level to the financing of higher education. He wrote that they had been barely, or emphatically not, implemented. He suggested that the reasons for non-implementation included a poor statement of aims, poorly worked out financial implications and an ‘empirically unsustainable theoretical relationship between instruments and outcomes’ (ibid.: 46). He pleaded for the formulation of ‘more concrete, feasible and implementable policies based on documented cause-effect relationships’ (ibid.). Two years later Seymour Sarason (1990) in The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform, focusing largely on education in the United States, argued that schools were intractable to change and unable to attain their designated goals. The reason for this, he maintained, was the inability of reformers to confront the reasons for this intractability and a failure to learn from the past. The Centre for

12

Interventions in Education Systems

Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence (Datnow et al. 1998) lamented that it was the underpinning framework behind the top-down approach to education that was responsible for programmes not being implemented. Implementation, it argued, required an interactive or co-responsible model. Morris and Scott (2003), reflecting on attempts to reform education in Hong Kong, noted the same failure and argued that reforms designed to improve the quality of schooling had been more rhetorical than real in their impact on the organization of schools and classrooms. These are just a few examples drawn from the literature of what Ivor Goodson (2007: 1) labelled ‘implementationist myopia’. He and other observers maintain that in all the cases described above the policy to be implemented is assumed to be unproblematic. However, the process of constructing the policy is restricted to the experts, and it does not involve those who will be affected by it. Those who are responsible for its introduction and maintenance in the classroom were denied participation in the process. Hence, when it became impossible, for whatever reason, to put the policy into practice, the problem according to its originators was due to the recalcitrance of the teachers and their schools rather than the central authorities being insufficiently mindful of the process of implementation itself. What these varied criticisms have in common is the fact that little attention is paid to the process as opposed to the problem of implementation. If this was purely an academic issue, the more than 30 years of debate about the question might just be tolerable, but given that we are concerned with how to develop and put into practice educational policies to improve the life chances of pupils, the continued reliance on processes that exclude implementation is not only worrying but also positively disempowering, in the sense that it damages the recipients and can inure them to further policy changes. As the Canadian Council on Learning (2011: 56) has recently declared: The implementation of large-scale school reforms often takes time, is met with resistance or controversy, and faces systemic barriers. Educational change is a slow process that requires adequate time and resources, but decision-makers often wish to see rapid results. Educational reform efforts have typically moved through pendulum-like cycles, swinging back and forth between different ideologies. As a result, critics have argued that reforms are based on educational trends rather than evidence, are implemented too hastily, and are without effective assessment systems. As well, reform attempts are often criticised for excluding teachers from the decision-making process.

Implementation Myopia

13

This can also be taken as a description of the problems being encountered by one such organization with enormous influence in the educational world and especially in poorer countries desperate to increase their cultural capital. Here we meet the international organization that over recent years has been at the forefront of the development of educational policies and reforms, the OECD. We will encounter the OECD at many points in the following pages of this book. For the moment we wish only to point out the problems it has had to confront and its attitude towards implementation. In 2007 a team from the University of London was commissioned by the OECD  to work closely with the Ministry of Education, in Mexico (SEP) to produce a report, which was eventually called A Review of the Mexican School System in the light of PISA 20061 (Hopkins and Posner 2007). As part of the conclusions to the report, a list of recommendations was produced, many of which focused on the need to improve the implementation of reforms, projects and programmes, and, in the light of the findings, avoid the top-down approach referred to above. The response of the OECD was that no report under its name should make recommendations. The Undersecretary for Education in Mexico did not agree and to the fury of the OECD the Minister published the recommendations. Indeed, the Mexican government went further, commissioning the University of London to assemble a team to help them develop one of the key recommendations, the production of curriculum standards for basic education, and later they extended the brief to cover implementation issues. To this end the university team was asked to suggest a set of guidelines for implementation that could then be modified and amended by their Mexican counterparts, and put into effect. The implementation project was never carried out, meaning that it joined a host of earlier attempts at reform in the educational graveyard. Indeed, in a very recent OECD blog, there is barely a word about the process of implementation itself. Behind it lies the unarticulated supposition that the mechanisms, the proverbial usual channels, exist for successfully, reliably and sustainably introducing reforms. There is not a hint that the usual channels could well play a major part in sabotaging the reforms. The assumption is that if one gathers together a coherent and expert team tasked with developing a reform all that remains is for the usual channels to be activated. The model comprises a linear, unidirectional (top-down), mechanical and supposedly rational process. All that is required is that key agencies and agents take the required actions. The concept of co-construction mentioned above never enters the picture although the OECD, as we will see, continuously pays lip service to a ‘down-up’ approach.

14

Interventions in Education Systems

It is surprising that no one ever suggested that the main problem could be the assumption made about the usual channels for reforming education systems (i.e. the state and its agencies and agents) and, for that matter, about how they function. There is a growing awareness of the seriousness of this problem. In a recent inaugural presentation the current Undersecretary of State for Basic Education in Mexico (Alba Martínez Olivé, 3 May 2013, Undersecretariat Conference) made a seemingly obvious but often forgotten point. She drew a pyramid, the upper part of which was the new reforms and the base was the minimum operational conditions for schools to function as learning centres. She said that without such a solid base reforms would be unworkable. Among the key elements of this base were properly nourished children, trained teachers, basic infrastructure and materials, as well as appropriate conditions of work. The operational conditions receive far less attention than the other elements from governments and international agencies. Perhaps this is because they touch on the more intangible practices of teachers and their superiors as well as those of communities. But no amount of texts, well-trained teachers and healthy children will generate learning, unless the basic operational procedures, such as punctuality, goal orientation, respect among the stakeholders, and reasonable and coherent demands on teachers are in place. In the effective school literature all of these come under the heading of school ethos (e.g. Sammons and Bakkum 2011), which, though difficult to define, is fundamental for school success and the key to the acceptance of and commitment to reform. The Mexican Undersecretary of State suggested that one of the principal problems in the functioning of schools was the paradoxical combination of excessive and contradictory demands on them along with the virtual abandonment of the teachers by the authorities, both centrally and in the states. The same is true in many developing and developed countries throughout the world. If the operational conditions of the school are important so is the wider context, and here too there is a tendency to consider that if the technical aspects of policy are based on sound research and practice, they can be rolled out in an uncomplicated way to produce educational improvements. Once again, this view is misguided in that it pays little attention to the social context and gives the prime role to the state. For these reasons we need to explore the argument that understanding the discursive and institutional structures in which reforms are embedded and the social responses at all levels to such education reforms can help us better

Implementation Myopia

15

comprehend the chances of implementation success. It is not that policies are unimportant, and indeed the type of intervention that is proposed has an influence on how it can be implemented, but we also need to study, improve and adapt them to the settings in which we would like to see them working. But like our Undersecretary’s pyramid, they cannot work unless we dedicate more effort to understanding context and circumstance. Our purpose here is to highlight these few examples, and we could have easily presented many more, in order to demonstrate that, after three decades of expanding activities, both national and international agencies have not only failed to respond to the points and questions raised about implementation, but have even signally failed to undertake comparative work to locate the reasons for this continued and continuous failure. How is it possible that so much money and human resources have been dedicated in developing educational policies, programmes and reforms when the process of implementation receives so little attention and no attempt has been made to develop adequate models for interventions?

Presentation of the problem Our immediate purpose is to underline the importance of, and the urgency for, in-depth consideration of how to move from proposal to practice. Our intention is to explore the nature and ramifications of this immense practical and theoretical problem. One hopes that our discussion here can lead to a better understanding of the relationship between systems of social apprenticeship (the term developed by Émile Durkheim [1895] (1982), meaning not only learning a specific text but also the rules for the appropriation of knowledge) and societies, thereby opening up the possibility for a more viable and reliable process of implementation. We are conscious of the fact that one cannot be too critical in a negative sense. It is important to recognize the labour of practitioners and researchers working in this area and absorb their experiences without forgetting that the objects of their study, national systems of education, are no more than 150 years old and most are still in their infancy. Behind the need to identify causes lurks the important theoretical problem that has bedevilled the social sciences and its attempts to describe and explain the relationship between systems and practices of social apprenticeship and the social entities that develop them. Hence, what guides our presentation of the country cases in the following chapters is the need to consider how educational

16

Interventions in Education Systems

change and by extension innovation and social ambiance are related to each other, remembering that theoretical inquiry has to be contextualized by the practical concern of developing a coherent strategy. In the following sections of this chapter we will describe this problem in more depth, and we will look at how it has been dealt with by both those who devise reform programmes and those who reflect on the contextualization of these programmes and the processes of their implementation. In summary, we contend that our judgement of the quality of proposals and programmes for educational reforms depends on more than the supposed excellence of these proposed changes, their coherence and their technical robustness. It also hinges on successful enactment and application. What counts, perhaps even more than the production of a programme that can potentially solve the problems it is confronted with, is how and to what extent these proposals are implemented. Concretely, we must ask how well does a proposed reform work within school-level learning conditions, including those experienced by teachers, parents and pupils, and even more so, how well does it deal with the educational apparatus governing these schools. Unfortunately, as we will see, implementation of even the best proposals is far from guaranteed.

Epistemological bases It is clear that our speculation about the failure to carry projects through to their implementation needs to concentrate on examining the body responsible for administering the range of institutions that govern all aspects of life in modern societies, the state and its relations to what is now called civil society. That is, we need to examine carefully the organizations responsible for drawing up education reforms and to delineate with circumspection their role in the difficulties encountered in moving from the initial articulation of reforms to their implementation. That is why our starting point must be to look at the state, the collection of institutions responsible for administering key aspects of life in modern societies, and equivalent international bodies, and how they come to be almost universally, and perhaps unthinkingly, assumed to be, and accepted as, neutral sites capable of such activities. In the literature we find almost no dissent to the idea of the state being a site of power (cf. Durkheim [1895] (1982); and Weber [1905] (2002)). Both functional and conflict models of the state make this assumption, leaving little room for

Implementation Myopia

17

other ways of thinking. In our everyday lives and in our roles as educationalists we are so accustomed to the state being seen as a benign and useful set of institutions negotiating compromises for the good of society, that it is sometimes forgotten that the modern state is a direct result of the growing complexity of the social division of labour that hallmarked the urban and industrial revolutions and is thus a relatively recent phenomenon. The vast array of administrative and bureaucratic arrangements that first developed in European and Anglo-Saxon countries has little antiquity. With the advent of the democratization of representative organizations, of state systems of education, social security and the defence of human rights, it was naturally assumed that these institutions acted dispassionately. That the state fulfilled such a role became the received wisdom, encapsulated as it was in the writings of academics and researchers dedicated to human capital theory and other expansionary views of the role of education. State education is a product of the nineteenth century and the perceived need for social homogeneity, learning within a controlled environment and forms of learning that fit with the workforce needs of the new social order. Its more direct relation to economic and social development and involvement with increases in economic productivity occurred only in the middle of the twentieth century. In order to understand how it is that the state is seen as historically transcendent we need to revisit the ideas of those who first dealt with the problem of the rise of the modern state. Confusion about the role of the state is lodged in the ideas of the founding fathers of the theory and applications of the social sciences – Émile Durkheim [1895] (1982), Max Weber [1905] (2002), the English Pragmatists (e.g., Herbert Spencer [1842] (1993)) and the Marxists (e.g., Friedrich Engels [1845] (1975)). They shared a common view of the state. For Émile Durkheim [1895] (1982) the role of the state through the provision of education was designed to hasten the development of a society based on the principles of mechanical solidarity and natural cooperation and the demise of organic solidarity that blocked the progressive and positivistic development of the natural forces of the division of labour. This might strike us as naïve today but one should not forget that national systems of education grew up during Durkheim’s life time, as did the changes in the mode of production leading to an industrial and urban society that seemed to offer the possibility of greater cooperation based upon shared values and a new moral order. Properly developed education systems were thought of as the instrument to develop the new co-operative society that Durkheim favoured and thought was inevitable.

18

Interventions in Education Systems

For Max Weber [1905] (2002), the state apparatus of the newly found German Empire with its Prussian overtones was a guarantor of social order, and its role was to prevent those opposed to the present order of society, the Social Democrats as they were then, from upsetting the status quo that had led to the unification of Germany as a single state and economic powerhouse. Weber could easily support the extension of state control into areas such as the provision of social insurance, social security and the setting up and running of educational institutions, because these institutions made concessions to the working classes that made their labour more bearable. Perhaps more importantly for Weber, these concessions strengthened a belief in the state as the fount of the existing stock of material and symbolic values. Hence the state constituted the heart of Weber’s theory of society. The state sanctified the existing social structures and it followed that the task of the social sciences consisted in studying their discrete functions. Individual behaviour was, in his view, a product of these functions. Of course, for Durkheim this was never the case, and, as we will see, this led to an interesting theoretical twist. The English pragmatists, Herbert Spencer [1842] (1981), Charles Booth (1902), Henry Mayhew [1861] (2010), Patrick Geddes (1915), Joseph Rowntree (cf. Vernon 2005), and Beatrice and Sydney Webb [1932] (2010), with their whiggish notions of the state and the sponsorship of state institutions simply assumed it to be the body that would lead to a better society, and, as such, the chosen organization to develop and manage the new institutions that would lay the foundations of that new society. The orthodox Marxist concern was ‘to capture’ the state and use its mechanisms to change the mode of production. The state and power were then to be contiguous as Eastern European countries were to discover to their great discomfort after World War II. But what they failed to appreciate was the immense power struggles that took place behind the facade. In summary, the importance of Durkheim, Weber, the English empiricists and social improvers, and the Marxists is not only that they shared a similar view of the state and its institutions, but also that the concept became so deeply ingrained in the sociological and anthropological imagination that it became an unspoken and unelaborated assumption, in fact, so much a part of common sense that it remained unchallenged. The full immensity of the problem only became evident when it became clear that the process of implementing reforms was itself undermined by the statist model being employed. However, neither Durkheim nor the English empiricists produced as elaborate observations and analyses of the state as did Weber, for whom the state was at

Implementation Myopia

19

the heart of his theory. For that reason, his influence through the development of functional theory, via the work of Talcott Parsons2 (1964) and others, such as Kingsley Davis (1945) and Robert Merton3 (1949), was paramount. Because they saw the state as a finished product, they attributed power to it. French historians, anthropologists and sociologists such as Lucien Febvre (1922), Fernand Braudel (2002), Marcel Mauss (1922) and later Pierre Bourdieu (2005) argued that the exercise of authority was magically transmuted into power. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss (2011) the state was equivalent to the shaman whose rituals masked power and also protected it. Because of these assumptions authority was not seen as delegated but treated as a synonym for power. The few historical studies of the evolution of national education systems that have been produced are not entirely useful because they tend to operate within a functionalist model that assumes that once an institution is created it has the scope and hence the freedom to make decisions independently. This means that the mainstream theoretical models that have been constructed do not help us to understand the origin and changes in the relations between society and its systems of social apprenticeship. For that reason they do not help us to recognize the reasons why most education reforms are not delivered in ways that are intended by the progenitors of these reforms. From the outset the observations that were made of the growing influence of the state with its ability to penetrate into all walks of life, positively and negatively, established the basis for the idea of state neutrality and state intervention, which meant among other things that the state could be seen as operating at a level above society and social conflict. These ideas solidified to constitute the basic assumptions of both social scientists and policymakers.

The state and its variations This conflating of bureaucratic ideals with actual practice is common in all branches of public policy writing. But it is also a view that enters into and fixes itself in the popular imagination. We tend to talk of the government or the state interchangeably (as if it was a unified entity or a person), deciding everything from the distribution of computers to schools to developing a new and supposedly more relevant curriculum. We assume that it will happen as it is planned. There may be obstacles, but these can be overcome by fine-tuning and clarifying the rules for implementation, or so the thinking goes. It is common

20

Interventions in Education Systems

to see educational policy interventions or the external promotion of educational reforms as being without ulterior motives and above political and personal interests. But those who have been involved in policy development know that sooner or later they will find that they are caught up in a complex web of social, economic and political cross-currents. There are many criticisms of the assumptions that we have just outlined and we must explore these further to gauge their relevance. For example, in more recent times Joel Migdal (2001) takes to task the Weberian functionalist and unidimensional concept of the state that has dominated much of the work of social scientists. He argues that many contemporary theorists go beyond the view of the state as a neutral site, a place of compromise and an adjudicator between competing groups, and understand it as the prime mover of social change. This can perhaps apply to a wide range of approaches to policy-making and development, particular in those societies where centralized power is a late arrival and where large ethnic differences within artificially drawn frontiers lead to the state fostering a sense of national identity. Among the most important to operate within such a model were those economists dedicated to the study of education. We have already mentioned the pioneering work of George Psacharopoulos (1984) for whom the great economic expansion of the 1950s correlated with the growth of higher education. This was quickly transformed into a causal model, so that education was seen as the key to economic development. Such theories circumvented the need to look for a more complex framework based on a mixture of economic, social and cultural elements and rapidly came to serve as the leitmotif of international organizations. During the period when the activities of the state were greatly expanded into economic and social management as a result of this view, models of policy development and implementation and psychological/business management models that emphasize incentives that the state could use to influence behaviour were widely adopted. These approaches implicitly or explicitly take as given that the public sector has the capacity to act coherently as a unity in order to implement policies. Some versions of each take more or less seriously the recipients of policies by modelling typical behaviours, but these recipients are treated more as active respondents than as authors of change in their own right. The psychological models have been more associated with the business sector but have been applied in the public sector too, and tend to assume the malleability of behaviour according to incentives, again treating policy recipients as objects rather than subjects of change.

Implementation Myopia

21

However, the state continued to play an important role in maintaining social control, and the expanded state generated entire social strata that depended directly on it for their existence as well as the accumulation of the kinds of social capital that would guarantee their existence. Equally, the role of the state varied greatly from one society to the next. As a result, we find that two other approaches were developed: sociological and anthropological studies of bureaucracies and institutions, and political and political-economic analyses of the state and its development. These approaches questioned the primacy of the state in relation to other forces for change.

Classification and categorizations of the state It has been argued that a policy regime, in the sense that Michael Burrawoy (2009) originally used it in his analysis of production regimes and in particular Fordism, expresses its legitimate trusteeship over society through an image of the guiding principle for how society should be organized. This, for example, could be the concept of the invisible hand of the market, so fondly used in Britain since the Thatcherite era, or the protection of national identity in India (‘bharata mem rastriya pahacana’). The particular doctrine and its application in policy development and implementation can give us an idea of the regime’s fault lines and the kinds of problems and contradictions it is likely to have to face up to. In the first place we need to examine how the state has been classified and categorized into types. Cowen and Shenton (2003) developed a typology that consisted of a laissez-faire regime, a segmented protectionist regime, a corporative-clientelist regime, a developmentalist regime and a social democratic regime. The first of these is the laissez-faire regime. Here the authority source for the state draws upon the invisible hand of the market. For more than 30 years Anglo-Saxon countries have followed this path, ordering, not only the economy, but also, to various degrees, their social sectors, emphasizing the idea of consumer choice. As we will see below, this policy has had a profound impact on education policy. Although it is claimed all citizens are equal before the market and laws that protect them, in fact this rarely operates as it is intended. This has resulted in a continuous struggle between equality and corporate interests. Nation building in least developed countries (LDC) has in many cases entailed economic protectionism, often accompanied by political and cultural protectionism, a zealous resistance to external influences, protecting their

22

Interventions in Education Systems

national sovereignty from powerful nations such as the USA and European countries, and the defence of a rediscovered or newly invented common history and culture. We might want to describe this as a segmented protectionist regime. This has generated notions of underdevelopment and the appeal to forms of national development that are more autochthonous in opposition to Western influences. Not all national integration has relied on corporatism, though patron-clientage has been widespread. In democratic countries with large and diverse populations the state draws upon a shared sense of tradition or an ancient culture, while, at the same time, acknowledging in law and government the plural nature of society, such as in countries as diverse as India, South Africa and Brazil. In this category, the trade-off between the state and civil society is different from laissez-faire regimes in that challenges to the central government are commonplace. In this type of regime, protectionism in the social sector may coexist with liberalization in the economy. The third of our types is the corporative-clientelist regime. While generally working within a capitalist framework, corporatist systems are largely governed by centralized institutions, where social, political and economic power is shared among various competing groups, none of which can obtain hegemony over the others. Economic aims are ultimately sacrificed to maintain social cohesion, and while private enterprises are often dominant within the process of decisionmaking, many of their aims become attenuated and, indeed, sacrificed in order to maintain the social order. The system is based on compromises worked out by the elites of the hitherto competing sectors, and its weakness is that it is basically unacceptable to those who work within it because such a sociopolitical arrangement entails their own projects being marginalized and ultimately set aside in order to avoid conflict. Promotion is achieved through networking, usually funnelled through a single agency like a political organization and its ancillaries, which in liberal democratic societies would be called corruption. Most emerging economies have gone through periods of nation building to integrate diverse and fragmented populations into a unity for economic and political reasons. Mexico, Argentina and Indonesia are examples of countries that have sought a sense of national identity through corporate vertical integration (i.e. official unions and chambers of commerce, etc.). In this way, extreme social conflict has been pre-empted, but this has resulted in the sacrificing of efficiency in the name of patrimonial loyalties. The fourth of our models is the developmental state. In contrast to the early industrializing nations like the United Kingdom, where the state responded

Implementation Myopia

23

to economic entrepreneurship, in the later industrializers in the Far East, the state anticipated and fomented it. This was sometimes conducted through government protectionism and subsidies to business. All industrial nations at some point in their history have received protection from the state, even in Britain, as the debate about the Corn Laws testified (Hilton 2008). For all of the recent industrializers the state plays a central role in promoting development. Even in a clientalist rentier state, like Mexico, the business community, national, and even more so international off-shore, companies, enjoyed subsidies, tariffs and privileged tax concessions especially in the boom years between the 1940s and the late 1970s. What marks out Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and the newer Asian tigers is the productive focus of state interventions. Rather than acting as the authority over economic and social development, here the state established a reciprocal relationship with business, providing subsidies in return for high economic performance. The latter was to be achieved by borrowing cutting edge technologies from the west principally, and applying them to the increasingly multi-purpose enterprises of the region. The expert engineer was the hero of this scenario, driven most especially, and most relevantly, by mass education. In the developmentalist state, education precedes development, rather than following it; its funding being contingent on economic growth. Two consequences follow from the technological targeting approach to state support for business in East Asia. The first is that the emphasis on performance reduces the scope for clientalism that so characterizes clientalist states’ relationships to business and services. The second is that the emphasis on learning, or technological borrowing, places a premium on education as the precondition for development. As such, it is supported, and invested in, by governments, particularly in relation to teacher professionalization, thereby encouraging adaptability and commitment to keeping pace with technological advances. This therefore leaves little room for factional interests subverting the push for increasing educational attainment. In the last of our types, the social democratic regime, the state presides over a more egalitarian and participative citizenry drawing its authority from claims of inclusiveness, broad participation (e-government, referendums, etc.) and extensive social provision. In these regulated and consensual social spheres, citizens have internalized the meanings and ‘mattering maps’ (Mann 2006: 23) that prevail throughout the polity. Politics and other flows between civil society and the state are highly organized, offering the opportunity for effective and efficient attention to those whose voices can be heard. However,

24

Interventions in Education Systems

the downside of this kind of regime is its pre-emptive categorizing of interactions between the state and civil society, restricting fuller and informal public action.

Education interventions These models of the state allow us to develop models of how education systems change. Educational policy interventions are situated within the broader regimes outlined above. Educational policy in laissez-faire regimes applies market princi­ ples to educational provision through school choice. School choice is informed through the publication of test results, which is the currency for users to make their choice and providers to allocate funds. Theoretically, the government’s role is to protect and regulate the operation of these market forces. However, there are serious obstacles to the ideal operation of this approach, even if it is accepted that it is an appropriate way of providing public education. At its best it is only a quasimarket because users have unequal access to schools, many being constrained by lack of mobility, resources and the cultural codes they employ. Thus, the state has to intervene to compensate for rigidities in the liberal operation of the system. The driving force of these tests, and their use for mainly accountability considerations rather than scholastic improvement, has also corrupted the capacity of schools for developing teaching and learning programmes. Market models of education supposedly determine content through parental choice, but the fact that some parents are more vocal than others in expressing preferences means that the state has to step in, again undermining notions of consumer choice. In the United States, school boards decide on specific content under national guidelines; in Britain, the central government has developed a national curriculum.4 The laissez-faire regime has been associated historically with a ‘back-to-basics agenda’. Teachers lose ground as a professional group in the market model to national regulation of school choice, privileging parents, examiners and evaluators. Parental demands and external accountability mechanisms take precedence over teachers’ efforts to improve learning (cf. Piketty 2013). In laissez-faire regimes, teachers are not just sidelined in favour of other stakeholders. They are made accountable to parents and superiors for educational goods to a much greater extent than other stakeholders, while having little influence on the conditions in which their work is judged. Few policies put much emphasis on teacher conditions of service and work; yet, it is

Implementation Myopia

25

difficult to see how, for example, a national curriculum in the United Kingdom can be successfully taught in the highly diverse communities of contemporary Britain, without due attention to these conditions of work. Where payment-byresults mechanisms are strong, and teacher contracts are weak, teachers become demoralized, resulting in high turnover rates and paradoxically, poor teaching. This is the case in countries where teachers can be hired and fired according to (often spurious) criteria, such as uncorroborated parental opinions, or through tests that cannot isolate the influence of the teacher in relation to the many other factors that influence student scores on tests and examinations. The opposite case pertains to teachers in corporative-clientelist regimes. Here the flow of policy is top-down from the state or international institutions, that is, those forces emanating from the higher levels of the system cause or determine actions at the lower end and constrain local actions. Nevertheless, the power of official and corporative unions, in this case the teachers’ unions, obliges the state to negotiate over most key areas of education: teachers’ service conditions, the curriculum, evaluation processes and teacher training. These policies are frequently preceded by pacts, agreements or alliances made at the top level at the onset of policy reforms. Additionally, at all levels of the educational bureaucracy, policy measures become tradable entities over which different groups wrestle to gain advantages or establish loyalties and exchange favours. The substantive aspects of educational policies thus give way to political considerations of a corporatist and clientelist nature. Policies are drained of educational content. This means that the official organization schedule is a very imperfect guide to real policy flows. This results in actual practice in the classroom bearing little resemblance to original top-level intentions. At the school level, educators, exhausted by the continuous flow of endlessly changing and ineffective policies, tend to take the easiest option, which is to delay and prevaricate. Consistent with the top-down thrust of this regime, teacher training is directive, prescriptive and rigid. Again consistent with top-down corporatism, teacher accountability is strong but is mainly an accountability directed at the corporation rather than the clients, and tends to be discretionary because of patrimonial loyalties, even where, as in Mexico, it occurs through high stakes standardized testing. Here teachers’ tenure deflects motivation or sanction by results. Depending on the balance of power between the corporation and the authorities, the teachers’ corporation or official union may have to accept non-market incentives through periodic examinations or tests. Poor results lead to teachers taking refresher courses. In Mexico the

26

Interventions in Education Systems

adoption of standardized tests fitted perfectly well within the framework of appearing to take teacher accountability seriously, even if there was no evidence for improved teaching and learning from this kind of testing, the sanction of firing being obviated by tenure. This type of motivational mechanism is undermined when the process takes place within house, favourable or unfavourable relations leading to cronyism and corruption. In Mexico currently, the weakening of the union is bearing down on tenure and poorly formulated programmes of learning. Unfortunately it is doing little to improve working conditions, since, like many government bureaucracies, its input to educational improvement processes, unlike that of the teaching workforce, is far less accountable and even less subject to public scrutiny. Moreover, adherence to the top-down approach ignores the fact that local events generate or construct conditions or structures that have consequences far removed from them. In the real world they are active agents that may act in a variety of ways in response to reforms, changes, innovations and programmes. They may initiate reforms, sponsor or sustain them, or actively subvert them. However, this energy cannot be harnessed by those agents and agencies, responsible for the process, operating from above. In protectionist policy regimes, educational policy development is also centralized because the nation state seeks to bind together diverse segments of the population by setting curriculum, administrative and in some cases, as in the corporatist regimes, pedagogical conditions for action. Nevertheless, the very cultural and social class distinctions that pervade the society require the diversification of provision and the authorization of private and independent provision, consistent with the neo-liberalism prevalent in many previously protectionist economies, such as India. There is an active presence of the private and independent sectors in the provision of education especially for religious and ethnic minorities as well as for the poor and marginalized. This effervescence points up the tension between the public and private sectors and between the centre and periphery. Depending on the degree of decentralization of the public educational administration to the regions, friction may exist both between these levels and within the public sector. And depending on the degree of centralization, in this regime teachers are likely to be subject to similar state professionalization interventions as in the corporatist regime. Prominent interventions are training, accountability and standardized promotion and benefits (though as in the corporatist regime, these may be cross-cut by patronage). A national curriculum is typical of this regime, though concessions may be made to local and minority

Implementation Myopia

27

interests in relation to content and operational style. In the protectionist regimes the union may well have become a powerful special interest group, especially where civil society has become vocal and active, and where, due to its size, it has significant presence in the educational system. However, because it is not incorporated into the system as an official union, then, as a part of the bureaucracy, its relationship with that bureaucracy is different and does not depend on corporate agreements, the trade-offs so characteristic of official unions. In developmental states, educational policy development is also centralized, in part because the nation state seeks to bind together diverse segments of the population. The main reason for centralization stems from the strong planning imperative of developmental states where education is articulated in relation to the broader economic goals of the nation. Nevertheless, the very cultural and social class distinctions that pervade the society require the diversification of provision albeit under guidelines stipulated by the central authority. This is less the case in relatively homogeneous countries such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, than in Singapore, where the de facto ethnic diversity has increasingly been taken into account in educational policy such as in its language policy (four official languages: English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil) and the encouragement of mixing ethnic groups in schools. The protagonistic role of the state in promoting economic development through focused partnerships with the business world leaves its mark on educational policy. Education in Singapore is treated as one of the main drivers of economic development. As such it has had one of the highest spending rates in the world. (It was 15.3 per cent of total public expenditure in 2008 and rose to 20 per cent in 2010. The OECD average is 13.3 per cent.) Centralized workforce planning determines teacher supply and student allocation and also impacts on the various streams and career paths that are features of the educational systems of the Asian giants. In recent years, more flexibility has been injected into the educational system as a result of the globalization of the world economy and following the economic crash of 2007–8. Singapore, lacking a large industrial base, has had to respond to world market forces to establish its niche as an international high end service and trade provider. Close attention is paid in the developmental states to policy implementation and improving performance standards, and these are built into the system through advanced preparation of teachers and other educational professions. Performance monitoring is helped by coordinating bodies like national insti-

28

Interventions in Education Systems

tutes of education that work to maintain coherence within the educational system and with the broader planning of the economy as a whole. The pragmatic coordination of education under centralized management has invited strong criticisms of students and teachers being inserted into a system, allowing them little individuality in what looks like a highly regimented educational approach. More recent attempts to encourage innovation and flexibility in teaching and learning are undermined by centralized coordination, derived from a pragmatic workforce-planning approach to education. In social-democratic regimes, the state’s chief purpose is to ensure that education is provided to all citizens and is of comparable if not equal quality, as the basis for a stable, well-provided, democracy. Unlike laissez-faire societies, the regime considers that the market is unreliable, inappropriate and even negatively attuned to the provision of education, considering it a public good5 in Adam Smith’s terms (cf. Smith [1776] (1977)). It is thus segregated from the provision of consumer and capital goods, where the market can be relied on. Two elements characterize educational policies in this regime. The first of these is the preparation of teachers through advanced, university-level, training, at an equivalent level to the preparation of other professionals. This encourages high performance levels, rewarded by high salaries, again in line with other professionals, and it enhances teachers’ status, prestige and thus motivation in the society. And secondly, there is broad participation in the operation of the educational process both as an expression of the democratic and inclusive principles of the regime as a whole and also as a way of co-opting valuable partners into the educational process, thereby maintaining its quality and value in society. Evaluative mechanisms of teachers and students rely on classroom performance and formative assessment processes; standardized testing being treated with suspicion and seen as divisive, bringing in competitive market principles into a field in which their influence is considered destructive.

The role of the state The framework that we have set out above provides us with an instrument that could possibly allow us to relate educational policies to the broad policy regimes in which they play an important part. It is possible for there to be inconsistencies between the two, such as the British Labour Party’s continuation of fundamentally market-driven (neo-conservative) educational policies.

Implementation Myopia

29

An even more striking example is Mexico’s grafting of neo-liberal testing policies, associated with parental school choice, on to teacher promotion, in a system where parents have no choice and teacher promotion, despite recent changes, continues to be corporatist and clientelist. How can we explain these inconsistencies? The presence of inconsistencies points to there being noneducational factors at work, which do not permit a purely technical explanation. As we have already suggested, the missing dimension is sociopolitical. Thus, in the case of the United Kingdom, the electoral chances of the incoming Labour party were seen to be boosted by maintaining a quasi-market in school choice, and stratified diversifying institutions. In the Mexican case, the adoption of standardized tests fitted perfectly well within the framework of appearing to take teacher accountability seriously, even if there was no evidence to support this for improving teaching and learning. The state’s command over a wide range of information and expertise also gives it strong credentials to have the knowledge needed to manage society in the most effective and efficient way. But there is an important contrast between specialized knowledge about society and how it changes and insider knowledge that derives from the everyday experience of those affected by these changes. Just as civil society tends to be treated as the object of policy, so to, the knowledge it holds is easily displaced in favour of official knowledge. Teachers confront this on a daily basis when they contrast their experiences of their pupils with what they learnt on official training programmes. When the state appeals to its knowledge base to enact policies, it exerts a near monopolistic hold over strategic resources. It levies taxes and has control over a large swathe of human, financial and material resources. In Least Developed Countries the state may be the largest employer. It also has strategic control over infrastructure, as Michael Mann (2005) has reminded us, although it has been recently divesting itself of its holdings. Both he and Migdal (2001) emphasize the importance of the state’s role in developing national rituals, of belonging to the territorial entity that is the nation, and over which it holds sway in the international community of nations. The state also appears to play a key role in shaping the priorities, or what Mann (op. cit.) calls the ‘mattering maps’, of a country. Both rituals of belonging and mattering maps are central to education, particularly in the curriculum and the operation of school routines. Up to this point we have presented a disturbing and, indeed, surreal panorama. Given the absence of a theoretical model of explanation, it has been an account

30

Interventions in Education Systems

of the continued disjuncture between developing large and sometimes excellent programmes and projects whose aim is to improve educational policies and practices and implementation processes. Not only is delivery not implicit within the proposed reforms, but, in addition, it is barely mentioned. The organizations that propose the reforms as well as those which have commissioned them almost never reflect on their own practices. They have very short institutional memories if, indeed, any memory at all. National administrations often start tabula rasa at their inception with a leitmotif and propositions that do not take into account previous programmes and their successes and failures, and often regard all previous efforts as failures per se. This lack of continuity means that new organizations are established that often conflict with previously established ones, often leading to stalemate. The state and what is referred to as its bureaucracy or administrative concomitant have changed significantly and at a very rapid pace over the last 150 years, evolving from a purely social control mechanism and adjunct to large enterprises such as the East India Company into an organization providing services such as education and elements of a welfare state. This is true of European states but less true of those classified as emerging or developing economies. In most cases the state and its bureaucracy are defined as a particular configuration of unstable and chronically changing balances between social forces themselves created in the first instance by changes in the division of labour, or what Karl Marx (2005) described as the means of production.6 These forces produce a social division of labour that itself varies over time and space, and that social division of labour or mode of production is difficult to change even in the light of the development of a new division of labour. The problem is that the two major groups of theories that have been developed, those that are based on conflict models and those that deal with functions and their agents, are surprisingly reductionist in their interpretations. There is an assumption, for example, that once the state is created it is an immutable object, and once a bureaucracy is in place then it is fixed for ever. In both cases the advantage of being immovable is that explanation is relatively easy since it becomes no more than a question of discovering, listing and then analysing its elements. The disadvantage is that dealing successfully with the notion of change becomes very difficult, and furthermore, that moving from the macro level of dealing with impediments to enacting educational reforms to the micro-level of the classroom becomes almost impossible.

Implementation Myopia

31

For that reason one should not be surprised that both the conflict and bureaucracy models remain at a macro level and the disjuncture between the macro and micro levels is such that the reader or practitioner cannot understand how one moves from the one to the other. The tendency then is to attempt to adjust perceptions of the micro level to the macro level rather than opting for an interactive model that does not attempt to force the empirical data into preformed frameworks. Indeed, this leads to a very special and selective reading of history where only those historical events and processes that relate very directly to the structuring of a particular institution or practice are considered, with the others being rejected. We have already referred to two types of macro-theoretical approach: conflict models and bureaucratic or functional models. There is also a third macrotheoretical approach, which completely avoids the issue by proclaiming that it is only interested in the here and now, and not how one arrived at the here and now, and how it, too, is evolving into something that is different. This meta-pragmatic approach is characteristic of the international organizations responsible for developing educational reform packages.

International organizations International banks and financial agencies, for example, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), are constituted to work exclusively with national governments. The largest contributors, principally the developed countries, for financial reasons and because they have institutional resources such as research and development centres, generally have more influence over policy. Recipient governments respond to their recommendations, and how they do this depends on their regime type and organization. Furthermore, it is possible to identify three broad types of interaction: the external agency is the dominant partner in the relationship; there is a genuine alliance between the external agency and the national government; and the national government appropriates those funds and ideas from the international agency to fit its own model of development. However, the role of international organizations has changed enormously in recent years as they have taken on added responsibilities due to the growing integration of labour markets. A prime example of this is the OECD whose work in education has grown far beyond the encouragement and publication

32

Interventions in Education Systems

of academic research that could inspire national entities to consider the implications of research in helping to solve their problems. In the light of human capital theory educational work in the OECD focused increasingly on the need for a set of international standards and this led to the development of the PISA, and, through the logic of PISA, has expanded to the OECD developing programmes and projects to advise national governments about how to adjust their education systems to respond to the pressures and effects of globalization. Advice in the form of gentle persuasion has increasingly moved in the direction of providing definitive models of change and a view in the OECD that nations must conform to the standards it sets. Not only is this true of member states, but, by extension, to smaller political entities that do not aspire to become a part of the OECD. Having developed an instrument that is supposed to measure the effectiveness of what and how children learn and how they apply what they have learnt, it is a logical step for the OECD to become both judge and jury. It sets the benchmark, and other international and multinational organizations follow. Yet it has neither the human nor the material resources to do such work and its theoretical underpinnings are an immediate reflection of the dominant and changing view of the relationship between production and human agency. The potential for creating an internationally mobile administrative class is there, as well as the danger of marginalizing local capacities. As we will see in Chapter 3, the OECD is subject to political winds that drive it in a confusing number of directions at the same time, even if the dominant direction is towards the construction of an international standard. In the immediate post-colonial period bilateral aid from government to government tended to favour ex-colonies, for example, the aid process flowed from the United Kingdom to India. These relationships have persisted in varying degrees, but a broad range of other governments have entered the field, notably the Scandinavian countries, and in addition, South to South aid flows have become more important. Given the spectrum of bilateral aid diversification, the recipient government has the leeway to choose the mix of support it receives from each donor government. Independent agencies, principally foundations, religious institutions and charities have considerably less funds that the banks or bilateral programmes and thus look for impact through focused interventions at all levels, but historically those closer to the school level. The relations between large-scale aid, national government and these independent agencies vary a great deal. Their harmonization depends on the government’s relationship with civil society.

Implementation Myopia

33

The work undertaken by agencies such as the United Nations, the OECD, think tanks and academia is principally consultative. In some cases governments pay for their services, in others the advice is paid for from the organization itself or other donors, and in some cases, the relationship is reciprocal. Specific programmes such as teacher training, curriculum development and administrative reform vary according to international currents of opinion, for example, in the immediate post-colonial period in Asia and Africa an expansion of schools, teachers and materials was the priority. Specific interventions vary according to fashion but cannot be directly associated with any regime type. Nevertheless, certain kinds of intervention are associated with the different kind of agencies and may be favoured by certain policy regimes. For example, the large-scale reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were a product of neoliberal structural adjustments by governments round the world, and very much supported by the development banks. Outward-looking policy regimes such as, for example, Mexico and other corporatist regimes in the same period were clear recipients of such interventions. Mexico proved particularly adept at integrating structural reforms with its recent outward-looking neoliberal policy, while at the same time maintaining the corporatist vertical integration of its educational system. It did this while paradoxically introducing decentralizing processes. Protectionist regimes on the other hand were hostile to such large-scale reforms in general and in particular to the international banks. India is a notable case. For decades after independence, it jealously guarded its sovereign control over its public education system. However, during the 1980s three factors induced the government of India to modify its stance: poor educational performance, fast economic growth and the increasing demands of its minority and underprivileged classes for better educational provision. As a result currently India, along with other protectionist countries, is more open to a variety of educational interventions but always implemented under the close scrutiny of its national and state governments. During the 1990s criticism of large-scale reforms grew (cf. Giddens 1994), in part because of a neglect of pedagogical issues, in part because of a neglect of school-level processes and in part because the reforms failed to impact on the systems as they were intended. Particularly among independent agencies, but also in some bilateral programmes, attention shifted to locallevel improvements and educational innovations. Even the World Bank from the late 1990s onwards began to reframe its interventions, conducting

34

Interventions in Education Systems

pilot studies in schools and communities, sponsoring parental participation programmes in war-stricken Central American countries (e.g., Educación con Participación de la Comunidad – EDUCO7) and promoting reading programmes8 elsewhere. In the next chapter we focus our attention on internal processes of education reform, addressing the role of the state in promoting interventions in education systems. However, this does not signal a neglect of those extra-national influences that we referred to above, and we return to a consideration of these in Chapter 3.

2

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

In trying to understand how interventions in education systems work, in the first instance we need to remind ourselves of the principal elements of a public educational practice, namely, that it comprises the state’s deployment of human resources, its strategic hold over infrastructure and other material and financial resources, its mobilization of ceremonies, rituals, meanings and values, and its creation and maintenance of a central value system. Change to an education system is always a change to the status quo, to what already exists. Therefore, in trying to understand how national education systems, and their curricula, change, we need to understand how those systems and curricula are currently structured. What this means is that the same programme of reform delivered in different countries is likely to have different effects on the different elements of the system and will have different histories within the system. We can categorize reform effect and history in five ways: point of entry into the system and direction of flow, sustainability of the integrity of the reform, intensity of the reform or capacity to effect change, malleability of the system or capacity to change, and institutionalization processes. With regard to the first of these, point of entry and direction of flow, it is possible to identify a number of possible scenarios. There are different points of entry and these may be characterized as: at the top of the system where this is understood either as the progenitor of policy or as the apex of a power structure however diffuse it is or becomes; at the bottom of the system so that the point of entry is not at the political, policy-making, bureaucratic or official level but at the level of teacher and classroom; or at a series of entry points with the result that reform processes may or may not be integrated. Broadly, three models depicting direction of flow can be identified: a centrally controlled policy process where the direction is unidirectional, and downward oriented; a pluralist model where the direction of flow is still unidirectional, however, the developmental flow is

36

Interventions in Education Systems

to all parts of the system and the orientation is pluralist; and a fragmented and multidirectional model where new policy (which represents the reform) is always in a state of flux as policy texts are received and interpreted at different points in the system and the process is understood as fragmented, non-linear, contested and as a place where original intentions are rarely fulfilled in practice. The second of these elements is the sustainability of the integrity of the reform over time. What we mean by this is the capacity of the reform to retain its original shape, form and content as it is disseminated through the system. An education reform is embedded in what already exists. Most obviously the reform itself as it was originally conceived (in its pure and ideal state) undergoes processes of amendment, modification, correction and revision, and it does this at different points in the process. These different points we might want to describe as exploration and development, re-contextualization, implementation, re-implementation and institutionalization. When we refer to the integrity of a reform, we should not understand this in any ideal or absolute sense. A reform or an intervention in a system is always an amalgam of different ideas and prescriptions, which is never completely coherent. What we can suggest, however, is that in the long process of formulation to application to implementation to institutionalization, the original integrity of the reform is either strongly or weakly maintained. The third feature is the intensity of the reform (or intervention) or its capacity to effect change. This refers to the structure of the reform or the way it is constituted. Some reforms are focused on relations within the system, which are likely to have a minimal impact on the system as a whole; others aim to influence the whole workings of the system. Examples of the former include labour market reforms, which though they usually come within a package of other reforms, are designed to impact on one part of the system and not the whole of it. On the other hand reforms which focus on the curriculum and the way it is delivered, as in the 1988 Education Reform Act in the United Kingdom, which changed the whole tenor and orientation of education in that country, can be thought of as whole system reforms or interventions. Furthermore, some of these reforms are crafted so that, even given the state of the system into which they are being introduced, they have a more fundamental impact than other reforms. This in turn points to the degree of resilience of the system or capacity to resist a reform. And, indeed, any educational system has a limited capacity to resist being reformed, not least because those elements that allow it to resist may be the objective of the reform; systems thus have a greater or lesser capacity to resist reforms. Equally, a reform

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

37

itself has a greater or lesser capacity to impact on and change the structures and environments into which it is being introduced, and in part this refers to how it is going to be introduced, but also to the structures and constitution of the reform package itself. Its penetrative power (though this may not be realized) or capacity to effect change is different with different reforms. We might want to call this the intensity of the reform or intervention, and clearly its obverse is the resilience or otherwise of the current arrangements within the system. This is the malleability of that system. Then there are institutionalizing elements in the system. The first of these refers to the longevity and sustainability of resource arrangements, allocations of particular people to positions of responsibility, particular roles and arrangements of power and authority, the capacity of key people in the system, new policy discourses, new policies and new priorities. And the second element is the capacity to adapt to changes to them. An example of an institutionalized mechanism set up to allow this to happen is a formal curriculum review at a set point in time, though most educational processes of review, development and implementation round the world are conducted on an ad hoc basis; when, where and how are decided by political imperatives. What we have been identifying here are internal relations in a change process. There are also exogenous or extra-national influences, although we have to be clear that these globalizing pressures do not determine policy and practice within particular countries in an over-arching way. Globalization comprises a process of policy and practice convergence between different nations, regions and jurisdictions in the world. This can occur in a number of ways. The first is through a process of policy-borrowing or policy-learning, where the individual country is the recipient of policies from other countries or from a collection of other countries. These processes impact in complex ways on educational practices, and not only on state-sponsored ones. The second is through the direct impact of supranational bodies which have power and influence over member countries and which are seeking harmonization of national educational policies and practices. The third is a more subtle approach and this is where the supranational body does not deal in policies or practices but in a common currency of comparison, which may be epistemic (as in the means used by, for example, the OECD to compare one education system with another) or functional (as in the distribution of resources, including discursive resources). The fourth process that potentially allows convergence is the autochthonous response of each national system of education to a common imperative from

38

Interventions in Education Systems

outside its jurisdiction, though clearly this is more likely to encourage divergence rather than convergence. The fifth is a direct response to globalization pressures by a nation, region or jurisdiction. With regard to the influence and impact of globalization, there are four possible spatio-temporal positions and these focus on the extension and extensive capacity of the global network, its intensity, the velocity of global flows and the impact they are likely to have (cf. Hill 2009). We address these issues in Chapter 3, where we examine these globalizing imperatives and influences in more detail and in particular develop further Lingard’s (2000) notion of vernacular globalization, which pays careful attention to national, regional and jurisdictional autochthonous responses to the various forms of globalization that currently exist. Here we are concerned with the internal relations of education systems.

State-sponsored reform processes Frequently, public policy-making is represented as a linear process where a government drafts the policy programme that they pass down to the civil service that is responsible for implementing and administering the government’s mandated programme of reform. This way of framing the transmission of policy is often depicted as a top down model and based upon a command approach to education reform and improvement. Accordingly, hierarchy supersedes trust and there is little room for professional contributions from the recipients of these education reforms. Resistance and indifference generally result. An alternative to this model is where policy is understood as being made and then continuously remade at all levels of the organization. When stakeholders at various points in an organization’s structure receive policy documents or instructions they enter into a process of interpretation where they apply their own experiences and understandings to make sense of the policy. In this process of mediation, the policy is adjusted and forms a new policy or programme, albeit framed within the government’s discourse. They implement the policy according to their interpretation of what the system requires. Accordingly, what is implemented may bear little resemblance to what the originators of the reform programme had in mind. Recent education policy researchers such as Stephen Ball (1994) depict education reform and policy-making as a messy, complex and contested enterprise. And, as has been frequently observed (cf. Whitty 2002), policy is an

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

39

object of contest and struggle between competing ideologies, education visions, personal interests and political or organizational positions. All of these forces work in an incubator of international, national and local contexts. For Ball (2007 and 2008), understanding education reform processes requires us to interrogate policy cycles, policy discourses, policy actors, policy arenas and contexts. Policy is produced through a series of struggles involving many actors and agencies. Furthermore, and as we have already suggested, local policy cannot be understood without reference to the global impact of transnational agencies such as the OECD, UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, not for profit and for profit organizations, and the like. This brief discussion does not reveal all of the actors and interests, or the levels of complexity, and we refer to these in our four country cases (see Chapters 4 (Mexico), 5 (England), 6 (Singapore) and 7 (Finland)). Nor have we attempted to represent the web of policy relations in any education reform process. Our point is straightforward. For education reformers the imperative is to understand the requirement for a multidimensional approach to reform capable of understanding the role of a variety of stakeholders within and external to the state education system.

State-sponsored models of change In the Introduction, we suggested that there are four state-sponsored models of change: a central control model, a quasi-market model, a professional expert model and a partnership model. The first of these is the central control model. The source of change is unidirectional. Educational institutions are accountable to governments for delivering a service that has its remit defined by the state. Governments stipulate which judgements should be made about successful delivery (the evaluative dimension) and about how this should be achieved (the pedagogic dimension). A number of criticisms of this model have been made, principally that it is a top-down statist policy model, which only occasionally behaves as it should in practice. However, in reality practitioners understand government directives and consultative documents in different ways, and this has an effect on policy implementation. As a result the policy process needs to be conceptualized as continuous rather than cyclical. Policy texts are never complete, but always allow themselves to be overwritten at every stage of the process and at every level (including the stages of implementation). This more

40

Interventions in Education Systems

fluid model of policy suggests that centrally controlled processes rarely operate in the way that was intended. Within this model it is possible to identify an evaluative state change process, where the state withdraws from the precise implementation of policy though it clearly has an important role in framing that policy. It sets up a series of semi-independent bodies which are accountable to governments, but which override existing forms of accountability, and whose purpose is to make sure that institutions, systems and individuals conform to government policy. These semi-independent bodies have both a role in interpreting government policy and imposing sanctions on those educational institutions if they do not conform. Whitty (2002: 46) suggests that this form of accountability is detached but ultimately compelling: The strong evaluative state is a minimalist one in many respects, but a more powerful and even authoritarian one in others. In Britain, it is not just that policies of deregulation have allowed the government to abdicate some of its responsibilities for ensuring social justice, but in increasing a limited number of state powers (most notably through a National Curriculum and its associated system of testing), it has actually strengthened its capacity to foster particular interests while appearing to stand outside the frame.

A principal criticism of this model is that there are unforeseen and possibly undesirable effects relating to its capacity to change the nature of what is being taught and how it can be delivered; and this for the sake of generating descriptions of systems and institutions, which can then be deemed accountable using a narrow range of indicators. By steering at a distance, the central authority is able to set in place tighter protocols and controls over regional administrations and schools through more elaborate reporting frameworks and mechanisms. This pattern has travelled across continents (Slee 2010), where there has been an increase in pronouncements by governments of the need for greater school-based management and local innovation, matched by tighter central controls established through funding regulations, a national curriculum, national testing programmes, published reports on schools based on student performance on tests, centrally controlled inspection systems, and national accreditations of teachers and inspections of teacher training programmes. In addition, an avalanche of education legislative reforms, curriculum revisions, new testing procedures, policy instructions and bureaucratic accountability procedures has heightened teachers’ sense of a loss of their professional autonomy. The pressure of reporting to targets and over-testing

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

41

has distracted education administrators and teachers from the examination of their teaching and learning programmes (cf. Hargreaves 2010). A second model is the quasi-market model of change. Here governments decide to withdraw directly from the formation and implementation of policy, and set up quasi-market systems which hand power to the consumer, thus putting pressure on educational institutions by either exercising or threatening to exercise their powers of voice or exit. If in the latter case too much of this takes place, then this threatens the survival of the organization. In this quasi-market model, a currency is needed to allow consumers to make judgements between institutions to exercise voice or exit. In the school system in the United Kingdom over the last 20 years, a number of technologies have been proposed and tried out: the publication of unamended examination and test results; of value-added results taking account of prior achievement; and of value-added results taking account of the different socio-economic circumstances of children.1 Each of these resulted in a different order of merit. Whichever technology is adopted, accountability works by making institutions responsive to a quasi-consumer interest, usually in the form of parents. The market is of course a quasi-market, not least because some groups of consumers have a greater capacity to exercise their rights of voice or exit, since they have a greater degree of cultural capital and can display and use it more effectively than other people. A third change model is a professional development model. Here it is thought that different types of decisions within a system should be made by different people, because at the level at which they operate they are more likely to have the required expertise for making such decisions. The model rests on a notion of expertise, so that those whose knowledge of these matters is superior to others make better decisions. This expertise can be understood as a capacity to make correct decisions within specific contexts, having acquired those knowledge, skills and dispositions that are appropriate to the solving of problems within these contexts. Accountability is therefore to a professional interest. This change model has come under sustained criticism for allowing particular vested interests to dominate, and these values are considered to have superseded other more relevant values. The final change model is the partnership model and the principle underpinning this is that since there are no absolute ways of determining the correctness of particular sets of values, decisions within educational systems have to be made through negotiation between all the stakeholders. This means that no one stakeholder has a monopoly of power over any other, or can claim a special status, but the various partners negotiate with each other and come up with agreed solutions. What this also means is that the method for reaching

42

Interventions in Education Systems

agreement has to be in some ideal sense divested of those power relations which privilege one stakeholder over another. Governments in turn forsake their privileged position in the policy process, avoid sectionalism and properly enter into a deliberative process. Professional development and partnership models have gradually been eroded within the education systems round the world and been replaced by evaluative state and quasi-market models of accountability. As we suggested above, this has had profound effects on the discursive spaces that teachers now inhabit. Reflecting on past reforms where an over-bureaucratization of the school sector and the encouragement of market competition between schools diverted attention from the original educational purposes, Hargreaves (2010) suggests that new reform approaches need to emphasize democracy and professionalism, and in particular, that sustainable reforms should provide teachers with clear purposes, empowerment and control in their work, and meaningful relationships and networks that help establish a sense of collegiality. This focus on purposes, empowerment and productive relationships can be applied at school, regional and national levels in the reform process.

Developing a community of practice A number of studies (e.g., Bishop et al. 2010) agree on the importance of a sense of ownership among teachers, schools and districts for implementing sustainable reforms. In practice, educational reform processes have often alienated teachers (cf. Apple 2006), since such reform programmes disconnect teachers from curriculum innovation and from critical reflection on their use of pedagogy and assessment (cf. Stobart 2008). The phrase ‘curriculum delivery’, used to refer to a teacher’s expected tasks, symbolizes their role as a carrier of educational content. Several approaches have been explored as part of a process to develop such capacities among teachers: including communities of professional development (Coburn and Stein 2010). Through a community of practice (Kimble 2008), teachers are encouraged to collaborate with each other in order to share practices and understandings for their professional learning and development. This learning activity may also involve working closely with researchers so that teachers can learn effective ways of contributing to and learning from research evidence, and, in turn, reflect this in their practices. The hitherto isolating nature of the organization of schools and the teaching profession, supported by the lack of ownership in curriculum evident in past

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

43

reform initiatives round the world, has led teachers to develop a ‘non-innovative culture of conservatism, individualism, and presentism – a fixation on the short term’ (Hargreaves 2010: 91). Engel (2010) has suggested that, in such an environment, teachers usually have different goals, values, statuses, backgrounds and accountabilities; hence, engaging teachers in collaborative activities is difficult and maintaining these activities requires reflection and regular adjustments. However, some initiatives to build a community of professional learning, providing teachers with mutual learning and moral support, have yielded positive outcomes. Examples of such communities are the professional learning culture in Finland and the United Kingdom’s Raising Achievement, Transforming Learning (RATL) project.2 As a part of building teachers’ professional learning communities, teacher– researcher collaboration and infrastructure were also developed as a way of sus­ taining and strengthening research–practice links. The Best Evidence Synthesis3 programme implemented in New Zealand in 2002 by Adrienne Alton-Lee (2004, 2008) is an example of this productive relationship between researchers, teachers and education policymakers. Other examples include the work of Allan Luke and Peter Freebody at the National Institute of Education, which supports research into pedagogy and practice across the Singapore Ministry of Education4 (Singapore Teachers’ Union 2003) and the New Basics School Reform research programme in the Australian state of Queensland (Ainley 2004). However, it is important to acknowledge Hargreaves’ (2010) critique of teacher collaboration in education reform, that such initiatives have not always been connected to learning and achievement. The emphasis on teacher driven change and mandated collaboration in past reforms has sometimes reduced collaboration to rituals of ‘contrived collegiality’ (ibid.) instead of genuine teacher inquiry. Hargreaves suggests that professional learning communities should be committed to: transforming learning that produces good outcomes; valuing each other as people in relationships of care, respect, and challenge; and using . . . evidence and shared experience to inquire into teaching and learning issues and to make judgements about how to improve them. (ibid.: 92)

As a result, judgements that are subsequently made about teaching and learning practices are more likely to be soundly based. However, it has been suggested that there has been an over-reliance on data and accountability in education in the twentieth century. Education professionals at all levels are required to provide numerical evidence to show how they perform, and this is used as an indicator of effectiveness. Rewards and

44

Interventions in Education Systems

sanctions based on these numerical indicators have created pressures on school management and teachers (Leithwood et al. 1999). The expectations and roles of school leaders and teachers are reduced to targets and numbers instead of emphasizing the quality of teaching and evaluating the quality of the learning experience. School principals increasingly see themselves as managers who interpret and manipulate these numbers. Teachers prioritize curriculum content that is relevant to standardized testing, focusing on improving test results. The curriculum is narrowed while students are drilled to master tests. In effect, what we are advocating here, and in opposition to this narrowing of the curriculum, is a professional development model of education reform, and, before going on to look at extra-national forms of influence, we need to consider this model in more detail and to understand how it is constituted. Its underpinning rationale is that the only effective way of changing education systems (all else is peripheral) is to focus on creating appropriate learning environments and in particular on the central figures in those environments, teachers and learners. Such a strategy has a number of elements and connections between those elements. Apart from the content and methodological knowledge that teachers need in order to plan and teach a lesson, they also have to take a variety of other factors into consideration and integrate them in a coherent, efficient and pedagogically effective way. Among these are the previous knowledge, schooling biographies and expectations of their students, the individual differences between them (e.g., capacities, interests and motivations), the objectives of the programme and the overall institution, as well as their own pedagogical aims, theoretical assumptions and values. Teachers have to make a considerable amount of instantaneous and ad hoc decisions; they need to react to and take the lead in classroom interactions and modify their plans and methodological procedures according to the needs of students at specific points in time during the lesson. Ideally they should create an atmosphere that encourages learning and communication and make sure that the task level is neither too high nor too low. In addition to this, institutions as well as classes have their own particular norms and patterns of interaction and communication. Teachers play a key role in mediating between this institutional culture and their students. They usually determine the content of classroom talk, organize the distinct phases of the lesson, determine the behaviour that is expected from students, select who is permitted to respond to a question or contribute to a discussion, decide what kind of answers are regarded as valid and so forth. The fact that teachers have to take a multitude of sequential and simultaneous decisions which include

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

45

personal, interpersonal, interactive, disciplinary, pedagogic and institutional factors requires a new approach to in-service teacher-training, one based on a notion of professional development. Imposing a pre-defined and fixed innovation on teachers (and students) in diverse institutional and regional contexts in a coercive, top-down fashion is counterproductive and likely to make teachers revert to ‘safe’ routinized practices. It seems more promising to encourage practitioners to try out new ideas in their classroom, to make adjustments, generate new material and justify their decisions. To this end an awareness of the contexts teachers work in and their own behavioural and communicative patterns is necessary. Participants analyse their own classes, strengthen their communicative competencies and classroom management strategies, and amplify their pool of teaching resources.

Teacher development and reflection Donald Schon focuses, in his seminal work The Reflective Practitioner (2005, third edition), specifically on how practitioners operate and learn in workplace settings. He suggests that most of our knowledge as it relates to action, or knowledge-in-action, is implicit. It does not involve conscious processes, so that actions, recognitions and judgements are skilled activities that are carried out spontaneously. Equally implicit is the knowledge the practitioner holds about the background, the history and the social embeddedness of the respective practice. This could lead to the assumption that professional action is basically a problem-solving activity where reflection and existing tacit knowledge is applied to emerging problems. Schon however argues that this widespread understanding of professional practice is too limited and has to be extended to problem setting, a second-order, more complex, form of reflection, where the practitioner also considers wider concerns and implications of the problem, including for instance, institutional, political and social structures, which are external to the workplace itself (in our particular case, the classroom), but impact on it: From the perspective of Technical Rationality, professional practice is a process of problem solving. Problems of choice or decision are solved through the selection, from available means, of the one best suited to established ends. But with this emphasis on problem solving, we ignore problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen. In real-world practice, problems do not present

46

Interventions in Education Systems themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling and uncertain. (ibid.: 39–40)

At this stage, the practitioner might set in motion a process of re-naming and re-framing of the problem. Indeed, he or she might not even consider the issue at hand to be a problem anymore; though it is more likely that this meta-process will provide the learner with a different type of problem requiring a different type of solution. Reflexivity and conscious analysis become even more necessary when the professional is confronted with new situations and as a consequence has to change or acquire new practices. Though the individual might perceive the new situations to be unique in the first instance, to make sense of them requires fitting them into existing frameworks of rules and resources. People do this by looking for similarities and differences: When a practitioner makes sense of a situation he perceives to be unique, he sees it as something already present in his repertoire. To see this site as that one is not to subsume the first under a familiar category or rule. It is, rather, to see the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what. The familiar situation functions as a precedent, or a metaphor, or – in Thomas Kuhn’s phrase – an exemplar for the unfamiliar one. (ibid.: 138)

Schon understands the process of learning as cyclical with successive iterations of comparing new and familiar experiences with well-established routines of thinking, many of which the learner (in this case the teacher) may have difficulty with bringing to consciousness. In professional practice, however, the individual also interacts with and acts upon the environment and attempts to make sense of it in an experimental fashion that can involve the following non-sequential processes: exploring the possibilities inherent in the problem, developing a series of action steps, testing them out to see if they fit the problem and evaluating the more successful solutions to develop working hypotheses. Experimenting in practice then is both reflective and transactional. The teacher-practitioner is at the same time testing out new hypoth­ eses and seeking to change the external setting in which the problem is embedded. Change therefore operates at two levels, the psychological and the social: The inquirer’s relation to this situation is transactional. He shapes the situation, but in conversation with it, so that his own models and appreciations are also

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

47

shaped by the situation. The phenomena that he seeks to understand are partly of his own making; he is in the situation that he seeks to understand. This is another way of saying that the action by which he tests his hypothesis is also a move by which he tries to effect a desired change in the situation, and a probe by which he explores it. He understands the situation by trying to change it, and considers the resulting changes not as a defect of experimental method but as the essence of its success. (ibid.: 150–1; gender-specific terminology as the original)

Professional development is hence a process of reflection in action with different degrees of complexity and reflection on action where teachers have to be encouraged to experiment with and explore new practices, contents and procedures in their actual workplace contexts and to think about their relevance, usefulness and viability. Reflection, however, can be greatly increased through collaborative meaning-making, dialogue and discussion between different practitioners who might add alternative perspectives, ideas and experiences. The exchanges between teachers from the same or different schools enhance a further level of reflexivity to the teacher development programme, namely reflection on reflection in and on action. An approach to professional development that emphasizes reflection in action, on action, experimentation and collaboration stands in stark contrast to common formal modes of professional development where teachers are asked to reflect on their progress against a set of descriptors provided for them from an external source, and then have to plan and execute action steps with the intention of improving their performance. This is a limited form of meta-reflection that suffers from the disadvantage that the teacher may feel that they do not own the process and that the set of descriptors are not written at the required level of particularity to enable them to improve their performance. The ideal model of professional development presented here therefore encourages teachers to find appropriate and justified ways to implement the acquired knowledge in their own practice setting. To this end, it brings together three types of knowledge (Jackson and Temperley 2006: 5), namely the accumulated experience-based and context-specific knowledge practitioners hold, external ‘practical and theoretical public knowledge which might serve to frame, support, structure, illuminate or (critically) challenge existing contours of knowledge and training’, and new knowledge created by individuals and groups of teachers, for example, through undertaking action research processes: This is knowledge which is collaboratively constructed by practitioners or developed through the processes of interaction, design and creation, but built

48

Interventions in Education Systems upon what we know and what is known. This third field of knowledge attains its place from a belief that collaborative processes, founded upon respect for existing knowledge, are the vehicle through which innovation and creativity thrive. (ibid.)

Although the concept of the reflective practitioner as developed by Schon has become extremely influential in teacher education and training, the concept has also sometimes been used as a slogan. One area that attempts to overcome the gap between theory and teaching practice by involving teachers as agents in actual investigations is action research. This research approach seeks to solve practical, mostly classroom-based, problems and to foster the practical judgement of actors in real situations: Since all practitioners are actors in social settings, surely the aim of research is not merely to describe, interpret or even to collect knowledge about the world but to develop a more profound situational understanding and knowledge with which to reason about and guide us in choosing appropriate and improved behaviour for action to identify with in social settings. (McKernan 2008: 124)

Involving teachers in curriculum development and implementation allows practitioners to own the knowledge they generate. It is assumed that innovation is more likely to be accepted if teachers are involved in the design of materials that are relevant for their students and adapted to their needs. Since curriculum development depends upon a high level of professional judgement, it is appropriate to build professional development around a teacher-as-local-expert model. This process comprises a series of steps: a set of practical concerns is identified. These areas of concern are expressed as questions. Evidence is collected to enable these questions to be answered. This allows the practitioners to modify their perceptions about their practice, to identify change mechanisms and to evaluate the state of readiness of the school, themselves and their students. The practitioner makes changes to their practice, and the effects of these changes are monitored and evaluated. The experiences and new insights are shared with others in similar contexts. A new research programme is instituted, and the practitioner starts a new action research cycle.5 The knowledge created through action research processes is both unique and generalizable. It originates in a particular institutional context with particular agents but it can at the same time inform practices in other schools and contribute to their pool of resources whenever the unique characteristics of the original context are made explicit. It is based on democratic procedures and values and can involve reflection on the internal

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

49

dynamics of the workplace, that is, the way students, teachers and administrators interrelate and interact in an institution. Ideally, it emphasizes collaboration, access to and sharing of information and knowledge, open-mindedness and dialogue. Building and sustaining Teacher Learning Communities (TLCs)6 is hence an essential precondition for effective action research cycles.

Teacher learning communities and collaborative enquiry Interpersonal and interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration still seems to be the exception rather than the rule and teachers generally work in a fairly isolated fashion. Fullan and Hargreaves (1996: 5) point to the potential negative consequences of teaching as a ‘lonely profession’: The professional isolation of teachers limits access to new ideas and better solutions, drives stress inward to fester and accumulate, fails to recognize and praise success, and permits incompetence to exist and persist to the detriment of students, colleagues and the teachers themselves. Isolation allows, even if it does not always produce, conservatism and resistance to innovation in teaching.

Professional learning is both a process internal to the individual (construction) and social (enculturation), as it requires participation in socially organized practices in particular communities (Borko 2004). Effective professional development should therefore not only encourage reflection and lifelong learning on an individual level but also collaboration through these teacher learning communities. Such communities share and critically interrogate their practices in a collaborative, inclusive and growth promoting fashion and ultimately pursue the common goal of improving their effectiveness for the benefit of their students (Mitchell and Sackney 2001). There are several additional reasons why teacher learning communities are particularly appropriate. Teacher learning communities are a non-threatening venue allowing teachers to notice weaknesses in their content and pedagogic knowledge and get help with these deficiencies. They are embedded in the dayto-day realities of teachers’ classrooms and schools, and thus provide a time and place where teachers can hear real-life stories from colleagues that show the benefits of adopting these techniques in situations similar to their own. Without that kind of local reassurance, there is little chance teachers will risk upsetting the prevailing ‘classroom contract’ (Brousseau 1997: 31). Even though it is limiting, the old contract at least allowed teachers to maintain some form of order and

50

Interventions in Education Systems

matched the expectations of most principals and colleagues. As teachers adjust their practice, they are risking both disorder and less-than-accomplished performance on the part of their students and themselves. Being a member of a community of teacher-learners engaged together in a change process provides the support teachers need to take such risks. In short, teacher learning communities provide a forum for supporting teachers in converting the curricular reform into ‘lived’ practices within their classrooms. Collaborative enquiry and learning has great transformative potential as it involves larger sections of the teaching force and enhances their capacity to deal with change. School-embedded teacher learning communities are sustained over time, allowing change to occur developmentally. The knowledge that is created will also be disseminated in real time. The collaborative enquiry is an inclusive activity and thus contributes to the generation and maintenance of a learning organization (Street and Timperley 2005). The involvement of the entire institution in a curricular reform is particularly important in contexts where a mismatch exists between the operational logic of the administrative and the academic systems, usually at the expense of the latter. Collaborative enquiry creates professional knowledge that is potentially relevant to larger populations of teachers and can hence be fruitfully transferred to other schools. While collaboration in and through teacher learning communities is generally supportive of teacher growth and development, particular group dynamics can also inhibit development. Teachers might for example be resistant to sharing their knowledge with peers or collude in withholding information. This, in turn, could be caused by particular interpersonal or intergroup dynamics as well as by  the very institutional conditions under which these teachers work (Fullan and Hargreaves 1996). The same authors call the tendency of a workforce to split up into competing and mutually exclusive groups ‘balkanization’, which they define as: a culture made up of separate and sometimes competing groups, jockeying for position and supremacy like loosely connected, independent city states. Teachers in balkanized cultures attach their loyalties and identities to particular groups of their colleagues. These are usually colleagues with whom they work most closely, spend most time, socialise most often in the staffroom. The existence of such groups in a school reflects and reinforces very different group outlooks on learning, teaching styles, discipline and curriculum. (ibid.: 52–3)

The aim however is to avoid this balkanization and encourage sharing, mutual trust, respect, help, open-mindedness and questioning of taken-for-granted

Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems

51

practices and beliefs. Above all, the purpose is to develop a sense of community and emphasize a common sense of working together that helps to sustain commitment and collective responsibility among members. Practitioner learning is hence understood to be contextualized and situation-specific. In this chapter we have focused on the possibilities of internally generated change. In the next we examine externally driven processes and in particular reflect on the role that the OECD plays in worldwide educational reform.

3

A History of International Organizations in Education

It would be a mistake to think that globalization acts as the sole driver of policy and practice within an individual country. Robert Lingard (2000) has developed a notion of vernacular globalization, and what he means by it is that homogenizing and standardizing global forces are always mediated by conditions, priorities, policy agendas and preoccupations at the national and local levels. The global educational agenda is mapped onto what already exists at the national or local level, resulting in contingent, unpredictable and contested situations. Globalizing processes, in so far as they are successful, work in two ways: first, national governments operate within global markets and therefore fashion their policies to fit this agenda or to exploit it; and second, national governments are subject to pressure from forces outside their jurisdiction which influence their policies and practices. We also suggest that the success of any intervention or experiment (by the state or another body operating outside the state), or at least the path it takes, is not just determined by the system into which it is being introduced but also by the type of intervention that is being made. And further to this, interventions and experiments are time sequenced, so that they are likely to have different effects at different moments in the history of education systems. In this chapter we illustrate this notion of vernacular globalization by focusing on the history of a significant international organization, the OECD.

International organizations International organizations and, particularly, the OECD, have come to play an important part in the functioning of education systems over the last two decades; a period that corresponds to an attempt to organize a worldwide economy hallmarked by a more efficient use of material and human resources.

54

Interventions in Education Systems

In the last few years we have been assailed by a proliferation of academic analyses of the globalization of education processes and governance (e.g., Mebrahtu et al. 2000; or Mazzolini 1992). The overt and covert message of the majority of these works is to suggest that we are rapidly moving towards a transnational form of governance of education. The literature (e.g., Carroll and Kellow 2011; and Mahon and McBride 2009) refers to a proliferation of agencies like the OECD that have evolved from enabling to compelling organizations, albeit sotto voce. We challenge this view, arguing that as long as the nation state is responsible for the apparatus and mechanisms of social control, it prohibits such a shift in power. Indeed, in theoretical terms if there is a clash between selection and control mechanisms in educational systems, control is prioritized. Our suggestion is that there is considerable evidence, if we look carefully at individual countries, that the international agencies are more often than not used by these national governments, who skilfully adapt, ignore or distort their findings and recommendations to further their aim of maintaining the social order through control of their systems of social apprenticeship (cf. Durkheim [1895] 1982). We argue that international organizations undeniably play an important role, in no small part because of their diagnostic skills, but we should not forget that inequalities of wealth and opportunity that are reflected in official and unofficial institutions and their practices cannot be reversed until the balance of power within the nation state is altered from within. That is, we cannot begin our analysis of a study of international agencies and their policies and practices until we have a comprehensive and transparent understanding of the history of the nations that use these services, and the how, why and when of their seeking to do this. We start with an analysis of the changing role of international agencies and describe how they work in reality. Our purpose is to move beyond the generalizations of the texts that deal with transnational governance (e.g., Meyer and Benavot 2012), and, through a consideration of the natural history of the forms and practices of such governance, suggest that international institutions have not conformed to the overt and covert models implicit in the globalization literature. The proliferation and expansion of the activities of international agencies came about for a number of reasons: the post-war need for the reconstruction and reorientation of Western European economies; the need to provide an orientation for what were formerly known as underdeveloped and then thirdworld countries for economic and political reasons; and the need to develop

A History of International Organizations in Education

55

policies that would counter the egalitarian precepts and practices guiding the Soviet bloc and China. Agencies and institutions of an international reach were seen as vehicles for the western world to deal more successfully with these challenges. They were to provide an element of coordination that was seen as necessary, in the first instance, to provide data that would lead to improved economic performance, and, in the second instance, to develop forms of coordination in relation to trade and international finance. These international organizations’ involvement in the collection of data relating to education, their undertaking of educational research and their giving of advice to national governments are relatively new and grew slowly over the years as a result of a perceived need to support and promote the dominant economic model. It was quickly realized that economic growth required educational planning, and educational planning required research into which educational models and which educational structures were best placed to achieve economic growth and the development of consumption and markets. The demise of communism set the stage for a profound shift in the role of education and its relation to economic growth. There was presented for the first time the possibility of a worldwide economy, unfettered by those internal compromises countries were forced to make with labour movements, which, in the view of monetarist economists, inhibited economic development. The concern changed from removing internal impediments to upward social mobility through the acquisition of cultural capital (the top rungs now being over-populated and subject to too much competition in the view of many stakeholders) to one of the mobility of labour. One spin-off from this was an abandonment of apprentice­ ship models of incorporation into the work place and the development of institutions that would provide the general skills required for free labour markets. This resulted in weaker protections for the labour force and a marginalization of equality agendas. There are broadly five types of international organizations or agencies. We will describe these and indicate their mode of operation, the types of influence they have in countries and the relationships between them. The first type is international organizations. These organizations are composed of member states from all over the world, as in the case of the United Nations or from regions such as the Organisation of American States (OAS) and Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Such organizations coordinate policy in sectors such as education, health, security and so on. The United Nations is the largest and most comprehensive of these organizations. The broader the membership base of the organization,

56

Interventions in Education Systems

the more independent it is from any particular sectional interest group. The other factor that enables United Nations policy coordination to be relatively free from powerful interests is the comparatively limited resources involved. Thus UNESCO is influential but has its budget limited to promotion, communication and events, but this cannot be used to support long-standing projects and programmes. The relative independence of its policies from the prevailing neoliberal agenda can be seen in its promotion of universal primary education and the Millennium Goals, rather than the managerial and administrative reforms espoused by the World Bank. The second of these types is international think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution, the Academy of Educational Development or, at a regional level, the Latin American PREAL. They have an important role in developing and communicating independent advice about educational policy and practice. Their distance from direct political involvement and their reliance on the academy have shielded them from associations with particular interests. Many like PREAL have close links to educational practice. Two organizations, which span our first two categories, are the International Institute for Educational Policy (IIEP) and the OECD. The former conducts independent research and communication while still being a sub-agent of UNESCO. The latter straddles research and policy in a different way through its academically based policy recommendations, notably its PISA. The third type is international development banks, notably the World Bank, and regional development banks, such as the IDB. As funders for development projects and programmes, these organizations exert considerable influence over national governments. These governments tend to follow the dominant trends of the most powerful contributors, particularly those of the West, and they are closely linked with the International Monetary Fund. However, in spite of the leverage these powerful funders exert, there are at least two ways in which their hold on national policy is not as powerful as it may at first seem. Within the World Bank, for example, there are diverse opinions and some scope for divergence from any uniform policy initiative. So, for instance, in Mexico in the late 1990s, whereas the dominant approach to educational reform was large-scale administrative reorganization, in addition, the government, with funds from the World Bank, also supported indigenous education programmes. Secondly, national governments redirect funds from international organizations to different projects, which they consider to be of more immediate concern.

A History of International Organizations in Education

57

The fourth type is bilateral institutions, where these arrangements will vary according to the donor and recipient countries. Finally, there are independent non-governmental organizations. These organizations are mainly foundations or charities. They vary in size and scope from vast agencies like the Gate Foundation through the longer established Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the more recent Oxfam to a vast array of small second level NGOs that may have limited resources, but at grass-roots level have considerable influence. These organizations are by their nature independent of government and thus are different from our third and fourth categories and to some extent our first one. For this reason, they are free to draw on and promote non-mainstream policies. In this way, they may well collaborate with organizations from our second category. Because they bypass governments and the international banks, they are able to innovate and perhaps, as a result, have real influence at grass-roots level. Foundations and charities are accountable to the taxpayer and to the deeds of the original funders. These factors do constrain NGOs’ actions, not least because their funds are relatively small and because the accountability demands make it difficult to sustain long-term programmes. The proliferation of these international organizations occurred as a result of the post-war reconstruction of European economies. The tendency was to understand them as independent organizations because of their near monopoly of data not available to other nation states, and the time and space to reflect upon the importance of these data and their possible application to improving economic performance and educational practices. Terms such as global, transnational and multi-level/scalar were used to describe the phenomena and were often wedded to the assumption that, as capital flows become international, so will labour markets and eventually governance. Hence, in recent years international organizations and institutions have been seen to play an increasingly important role in educational research, planning and innovation. Until there was a sea change in economic perceptions and orientations that occurred in the late 1970s, when the Keynesian model and its related version of human capital theory was abandoned and replaced by monetarist and neo-liberal frameworks, these international organizations focused their attention on sponsoring projects designed to allow young people to realize their potential and increase their life chances within their own societies. They encouraged the development of theoretical insights into the social constraints on learning particularly in those countries then classified as underperforming or underdeveloped. The key variables that were used were social class and the

58

Interventions in Education Systems

relationship between home and school. They evolved from offering a general model of explanation, to developing a diagnosis for these ills, and now, in many cases to presenting a prognosis, and even providing general ground rules, for interventions and implementations. There is currently a small but perceptible trend towards more direct involvement than formerly. This is occurring against a background of an apparently growing commitment to improving and, in part, standardizing, educational institutions and practices, seen as important in the light of the now dominant market-oriented theories, where education of a largely vocational kind is conceived as a catalyst for the development of human resources. Indeed, until fairly recently most of these organizations did not have an operational educational division or section. That commitment was made to persuade these nations to accept a neo-liberal model that replaced the earlier Keynesian approach,1 an important event that, as we will see, helped condition the development of thinking about education. These assumptions were gladly accepted by these international organizations, who saw in them the possibility of fulfilling one of their aims, that of putting an end to centuries of conflict and developing globally a sense of economic rationality that would lead to a better distribution of the stock of physical and social capital in the world. These perceptions and presumptions are expressed in almost poetic terms, such as ‘rendering obsolete older lines of demarcation’ (Djelic and Salhin-Andersson 2006: 4), and resulted in authority slowly and inexorably being decanted into newer institutions that were able to overcome the old system of conflictive nation states seen as a barrier to unfettered economic development. An important example of such organizations is the OAS, originally founded as  a consultative body in 1889, and then re-constituted after World War II to provide a host of activities for member states and to finance scholarships and educational programmes (cf. Meyer and Benavot 2012). The OAS has a series of aims or purposes: to promote inter-American dialogue on policy and practice in the fields of education and culture, through meetings of ministers, inter-American committees and knowledge-sharing seminars and workshops; to assist in knowledge transfer and capacity building through the design and implementation of multinational projects in education and culture; and to support networks of policymakers, researchers, practitioners and international governmental and non-governmental organizations which focus on key educational and cultural issues. Its priority areas are developing educational programmes to promote democratic values and practices; providing early childhood care and education;

A History of International Organizations in Education

59

constructing useful education indictors; developing literary and adult education programmes; preserving and protecting the cultural heritage; promoting ­cultural and economic development; emphasizing the importance of identity and diversity; and providing an information system to coordinate educational activities. Another example is the IDB founded in 1959 to provide loans and grants to member states in Latin America and the Caribbean to undertake educational research and encourage changes to education systems, so that there is an increase in access to high-quality early childhood and preschool programmes; provision of effective teachers and in general of adequate resources to education; and graduate training for the labour market (cf. Office of Evaluation and Oversight 2013). The recently founded Africa Development Bank aims to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth and reduce poverty. It funds projects which focus on infrastructure development, regional economic integration, private sector development, governance and accountability, technical and vocational training linked to the labour market, and the creation of small businesses. However, these international aid bodies generally fund agencies that encourage research and locally based support programmes. With the shift towards assessment and evaluation on an international scale and the growing concentration on institutional analysis, they lack the resources to participate fully in such endeavours and have come to take their lead from the only organization capable of doing this work, the OECD.

The organization for economic cooperation and development (OECD) Until recently few texts focused exclusively on the OECD. The one that most nearly fits the definition of an official history is The OECD: A Study in Organisational Adaptation (2011) by Peter Carroll and Aynsley Kellow. Like most official or semi-official histories it presents a picture of an organization smoothly adapting itself to reality; that it might be unstable is not of concern since this is essentially a whiggish interpretation of history. The OECD is seen as an organization which is focused on what Ron Goss called ‘soft power’ and it has grown from being an ‘economic NATO’ to an organization of ‘epistemic influence’. Two other texts stand out: The OECD and Transnational Governance (2009), a collection of critical articles, edited by Rianna Mahon and Stephen

60

Interventions in Education Systems

McBride, and built around the neo-Gramscian premise that discourse dominates reality (Markowicz 2011). In the book, contributors display various degrees of alarm and despondency about an organization that has shown an interest in the development of transnational governance. The same position underpins PISA, Power and Policy: the Emergence of Global Educational Governance (2012), edited by Heinz-Dieter Meyer and Aaron Benavot, where the OECD’s PISA examination is seen as the mechanism for its evolution into a world-governing body, albeit one that primarily focuses on education. Let us try to make sense of this organization. We do so in an unusual way. We first outline its evolution from an enabling to an increasingly interventionist organization, looking closely at the methodology of intervention it has developed. In order to illustrate its role and activities we then present what we are calling the natural history of a project, an intervention or experiment by an extra-national globalizing body, the OECD. That project is indicative of how the OECD works, and, in addition, it raises some important questions that are central to understanding this notion of vernacular globalization (cf. Lingard 2000; Lingard et al. 2005). By the end of the 1970s the OECD had become the first and primus inter pares of international agencies with the facilities to draw up educational strategies that fitted the dominant economic model of the times. Despite its limited membership and that it does not and never has directly financed these activities, for our purposes it is the key organization. Its evolving concerns most clearly match the changes in the dominant economic model. The OECD formed in 1961 was originally created as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948 as a vehicle for European integration that concluded with the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the overall liberalization of trade. The coincidence of European and North-American interests led to its transmutation into an organization that actively promotes growth, employment and rising standards of living among its members, all of whom at this time had very similar economic structures and wanted to set up an organization that would provide the information required to co-ordinate these activities to everyone’s mutual benefit, provide a forum for constant and continuous consultation and lay the basis for an agreed set of co-ordinated actions. This was both defensive in that it provided a bulwark against the Soviet bloc, and against China as it became slowly detached from that bloc, and also aggressive in the sense that it provided the information and consultation necessary to defend in the first instance its colonies and then its

A History of International Organizations in Education

61

markets. One official commentator described it as standing ‘as a colossal, and colossally successful, challenge to Soviet and Chinese Communism’ (Woodward 2009: 57). Unlike organizations such as the World Bank, the IDB, the International Monetary Fund and the International Labour Organisation, the OECD has no means for enforcing its recommendations, provides no finance for projects, and, on paper, exists only to ‘promote policies’ (OECD 2010b). Its intervention in education is extraordinary in three senses: the rapidity of the establishment of its hegemony over the field, the lack of reference to education as one of its areas of concern in its charter, and the dilution of the humanist tradition in its education agenda, which now appears to be supportive of a neo-liberal agenda in economic development and growth. However, as Psacharopoulos (1988) reminds us, education was not given any formal recognition in the OECD until 1961 with the founding of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), that was concerned with policy and social mission and not employment policies, workforce training and by extension the social apprenticeship of workers.

The OECD phase one: Loose coupling and relative independence The earliest involvement of the OECD in education was strongly contextualized by the post-war European consensus that education should play an important role in moving towards greater social equality in developed countries and also lay the basis for a more homogeneous society in what were then called developing countries. As such education was seen as loosely coupled with the economy and within the OECD was not seen as being of major concern. Nonetheless it was placed on the agenda largely as a result of the combined efforts of Ron Gass, who was head of the Manpower, Social Affairs and Education Directorate, and A. H. Halsey, who at this time was concerned with the unacceptable levels of educational inequality round the world (cf. Halsey et al. 1957). They persuaded the Ford Foundation to provide what were then substantial funds to set up the CERI at the OECD to focus its work on influencing the educational agendas of member states, although paradoxically, the leading member states themselves had not been interested in setting it up in the first place. Taking as their model the national reports that dealt with the economy, Gass and Halsey applied this to the field of education. As we will see, the transition

62

Interventions in Education Systems

from the economy to education was far from perfect because of the lack of appropriate statistical data and the perception that the education world was far more diffuse and complicated than envisaged by economists and financiers. The process comprised in the first instance the compilation of a report by a visiting review panel composed of experts drawn from the academic world and from educational practitioners. They visited the country and gathered relevant data from the national government, and also drew on independently published research. The outcome was a consultative report which was then debated and amended by the relevant OECD committee. These reports were not numerous. Halsey lists six of them,2 arguing that the reason for their scarcity was that there were too few researchers able and willing to examine an entire country. Another more important reason was that much of the data was inaccessible or did not exist. This was less of a problem with the original core members of the OECD, but when the organization began to assimilate countries that were not economically successful and had vastly different social and organizational arrangements, the problem was exacerbated. To Henri Nathan of the OECD’s CERI we owe the sponsorship and production of pioneering works about social constraints on learning that were to lead to a host of ideas and policies to unlock the potential of individuals and communities. Researchers, like Basil Bernstein (1998), Martin Carnoy et al. (1993) and A. H. Halsey et al. (1957, 1980), benefitted from his support and produced major texts on the roots of educational inequalities based on an analysis of social differences. We also find the beginning of national reports, written by teams of investigators, many of whom could hardly be identified as defenders of the status quo. Despite this relative independence from the main concerns of the OECD the work in the field of education did have resonance not only in OECD countries but in nonmember countries as well. These projects were not easily standardized, the criteria for success being difficult to measure and hence not appropriate for input/output models that characterized the next phase in the OECD’s move into education. Until this time the United States was reluctant to play a major role in setting the OECD agenda as it was to later. Once the European phase of post-war reconstruction was well under way, and European markets were beginning to recover, the United States sought to turn the OECD into a think tank for the transformation of national economies. Under pressure from the government of the United States, which threatened to withdraw funding from the OECD if it didn’t comply, it reoriented its work towards the development of educational indicators and instruments for a normative analysis of educational policy,

A History of International Organizations in Education

63

and the measurement of outcomes. As a result, the CERI was sidelined with three specialized programmes being created: the Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) programme,3 the Programme on Educational Building4 (PEB), and currently the most important, the PISA. This first phase of OECD activity is largely forgotten because institutional memory is short and its premises, projects and proposals no longer fit with the market-oriented model which is now dominant, where economic decisions are made with respect to the market economy, and education acts as an adjustment mechanism in conformity with its needs and requirements.

The OECD phase two: Strong coupling and relative dependency At this time the chief OECD paymaster, the United States, was concerned with the problems it had at home with its highly anarchic federal system of education that had no single rationale and no means for comparing one state with another. This coincided with the development of supply side economics and the perceived need to address what it was that an education system could offer. The United States tried to solve the problem by introducing input–output models into their analyses at home, and in line with this the American authorities looked askance at the OECD, because, in their view, it was riddled with socialist elements. The American authorities were determined to change the ethos and modus operandi of the OECD and introduce market-based economics to the organization, converting it into a vehicle for promoting neo-liberal policies. This view was accepted by some nations enthusiastically and marked a significant turning point, which was to lead to a much greater concentration on education, but education as dependent on neo-liberal economic principles. Input–output models and their measurement are most efficiently managed by a centralized body, and the OECD was the ideal organization to coordinate this process. This resulted in moves to develop national performance indicators, develop protocols for more rigorous selection, benchmark student achievement and adapt education to the requirements of markets and transitions into the workplace. In addition, there was an immediate shift from educational equality to a focus on human resources with regard to employment and employability. Here for the first time the OECD was prepared to carve out a niche in the management and performance of schools.

64

Interventions in Education Systems

Indeed, even in these traditional areas of study, there is evidence of a paradigm shift as Kjell Rubenson (2010) reminds us. An idea of recurrent education, which, it was claimed, would lead to increased equality and stimulate students’ search for knowledge, gave way by 1989 to a notion of lifelong learning, which built its arguments on the challenges of and potential problems with global competition and the new communication technologies. What had been an active intervention to encourage greater social equality became a movement to respond to the exigencies of the market, with the market being understood not as a compendium of institutions, agents and agencies, but as an inexorable natural manifestation of an unchallengeable law. In other words, this paradigm shift resulted in education moving from being loosely coupled to the economic agenda of the OECD to one of relative dependence.

The OECD phase three: The attenuated model and PISA By the 1990s and even more so in the new millennium, it was clear that changes wrought by the invisible hand of the market could be irrational and required some regulation. Leaving education to market forces without some softening of its effects, and preparation for the labour market without some flexibility, created a situation where the education system and its practices were becoming too rigid and prescriptive. There was a subtle change in emphasis within the OECD to allow greater flexibility and that involved a move from a strongly classified system of education to one that was less so. Emphasis was now placed upon encouraging through the curriculum the means for recipients to access and apply their own creativity through problem-solving. Although the concern with summative assessment processes was retained, what was now prioritized was measuring creativity and imagination and their applications, rather than an accumulation of knowledge. This was an attempt, as some commentators maintain (cf. Carroll and Kellow 2011), to overcome the perceived harshness of replacing Keynesian economic models with financial orthodoxy, liberalizing labour markets, deregulating institutions and mechanisms, and promoting monetarist policies.5 The CERI abruptly changed direction. Its department of education (‘skills’ was added to the title later) was given the task of bridging the gap between market forces and educational equity and equality of opportunity. The new agenda was composed of the development of the means to measure

A History of International Organizations in Education

65

inputs and outputs while at the same time retaining an attenuated notion of inclusiveness and equity. The scene was set for the construction of an instrument to gather and analyse data that would exemplify the OECD’s tempering of adjustment to market forces by the addition of an approach that could be construed as progressive. It proposed working towards reforms that would make national educational systems more effective in terms of encouraging curricular and pedagogic changes, and this signalled a shift from accumulation to application. The new approach provided a unique opportunity, it was felt, to combine educational progressiveness with a form of measurement vital to international markets and the more effective exploitation of human resources, albeit that this was monetarism with a human face. Within an inquisitorial framework it was seen as a logical and necessary step to organize a programme that would allow the collection of information about performance and use this to propose educational and structural reforms. Here we have the basis for the development of the Programme for International Student Assessment, known by its acronym, PISA. In recent years the most significant activity of the OECD has not been its promotion of institutional adjustments to the exigencies of worldwide markets, or its work on reconstituting older corporative interests to fit the new reality, based on what Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) describe as ‘faith’ in the operations of the market, but the development of PISA for analysing education performance. It has even been suggested that the OECD is poised to assume a new institutional role as the arbiter of global education governance, simultaneously acting as diagnostician, judge and policy advisor not only to OECD members but non-member states as well. Since its inception in 2000 PISA has proved to be a sophisticated extension of the inquisitory phase of OECD operations. It is defined (in OECD documents (2007a, 2010a)) as an international examination to measure the reasoning ability of young people at the age of 15, that is entirely free of cultural bias and can be used to provide an excellent understanding of the progress of young people among its member states and those states that are not members of the OECD but choose to participate in the process. PISA has been developed with a number of purposes in mind. Among these we find: the continued need for the educationalists of the OECD to respect the dominant economic agenda of the organization, yet at the same time develop an examination that measures not only adjustment to the market but encourages the kind of creativity young people require to be independent social beings; the need to produce a sophisticated instrument for measuring educational inputs

66

Interventions in Education Systems

and outputs; the need to provide a standard universal measure of educational achievement required for labour mobility across the frontiers of the nation state; the need to provide scientific tools to encourage educational reform particularly in what are classified as the poorer and low-achieving states; and the need to provide social science researchers and policymakers alike with the means to explore the relationship between education and economic growth on a crosscultural basis (cf. OECD 2007a). PISA was the logical outcome of the OECD’s long march towards the application of an input–output model in education, which required a stand­ ardized instrument to measure the performance of a selected group of 15-year olds through a dedicated examination procedure using teams of experts selected and co-ordinated by the OECD’s Directorate for Education. It can be seen as a good example of an attempt to develop an international knowledge network. Unfortunately, it has proved incapable of fulfilling even these moderate objectives.

The programme for international student assessment Technically, the PISA examination is replete with errors relating to validity, reliability, comparability, cultural fairness, curriculum orientation, application, interpretation and use.6 The default position taken by those working within the PISA framework and the psychometric tradition of assessment and evaluation is that a person has a number of capacities (i.e. knowledge sets, skills and dispositions), which we can describe as the contents of that person’s mind, and which subsequently we can characterize using the methods of experimentation and testing. There is therefore potentially a true score for a person, and this true score represents in symbolic terms their capacity in the particular domain being tested. For a variety of reasons, errors may occur in the process of constructing that true score, but these are corrigible, that is, they can be corrected by using different (and thus, by implication, better) methods and approaches. Errors may occur because the wrong type of instrument is chosen for determining the person’s true score or because their emotional and affective states are such that they give a false impression of their capacities. A person has a knowledge, skill or dispositional set, which is configured in a particular way, and it is this knowledge, skill or dispositional set, or at least elements of it, which is directly assessed when that person is tested. In contrast,

A History of International Organizations in Education

67

any testing that is carried out with the purpose of determining whether these attributes are held, not held, or even partially held by an individual, always involves an indirect process of examination, where the additional element is a conjecture, logical inference or best guess. Furthermore, the required performance elicited during the test is specifically related to the testing technology, so, for example, if a multiple-choice test is chosen, the correct answer, and therefore the correct construction of the problem, is framed to fit this technology. In order to obtain a true measure of that person’s capacity, and not, it should be noted, a comparative measure of the construct being tested at the individual or group level, then a retroductive mode of inference would need to be used to identify what must have been the case in order to bring about the observed event (i.e. the person being tested answering a multiple-choice question in a standardized test). The PISA examination technology ignores this fundamental distinction. A second technical criticism of the examination is related to the idea of construct-irrelevance variance (Messick 1989), that is, variance among a population of people being tested as a result of factors which are irrelevant to the construct being tested. Even if knowledge of or competence in the construct is equally distributed in this population, some of the cohort will do better than others (i.e. on their actual scores) and this is not because they have greater knowledge or are more competent in the construct being tested. This might involve either construct-under-representation or construct-over-representation (Wiliam 2011), and within the confines of the test itself it is difficult to determine which of these has occurred. The challenge for testers then is to eliminate such construct-irrelevance variance. However, this is not without its problems, and this is because we cannot say with any degree of certainty what the variance might be because we don’t know what a true score for the individual or an aggregated true score for a group is, and therefore have nothing to compare it with. Analytical comparisons can be made, and in PISA are made: over time, between different capacities, between different constructs, between different performative settings, on the same test at two different time points, with different items on the same test at one point in time, and on comparable tests at two different time points. These can only provide a partial solution to the problem of construct-underrepresentation or construct-over-representation. And what this means is that the judgements that are implicit in the PISA league tables of national achievement are almost certainly based on unreliable data and thus under-report or overreport the achievements of the different national cohorts. In a sense, this is of little concern, since the PISA standardization process does not require reliable

68

Interventions in Education Systems

and valid accounts of national achievements, only variance between nations in relation to both inputs and outputs. Furthermore, replacing a competency with a knowledge construct cannot solve this problem of the reliability of scores, despite this being the clear intention of PISA test constructors. For example, PISA – 2006 attempted to assess three broad science competencies: ‘(i) Identifying Scientific Issues; (ii) Explaining Phenomena Scientifically; and (iii) Using Scientific Evidence’ (OECD 2006: 12). This is because the problems associated with construct-irrelevance variance apply equally to knowledge and competence constructs. PISA test-constructors confronted by the problem of construct-irrelevance variance sought to rework the construct, so that those matters which might be considered to be separate from the construct, such as the time element for solving a problem in a test, now become part of the construct, that is, the assessment now relates to the capacity to solve the problem within a definite time period and not just to the capacity to solve the problem. This introduces a performative element into the construct itself. Once again, this move is beset with problems, since it weakens the idea that individual expertise in that construct can be transposed to other settings because it is now more context-dependent as an assessment. What has been weakened is the predictive validity of the assessment. In cross-national testing environments such as PISA, some of those performative elements can be standardized, that is, the tests can be conducted in roughly similar conditions. However, what cannot be standardized is the relation between what is taught and what is being assessed, how this assessed knowledge relates to its usage in other environments, and the test-taking capacity of the individual or group. A third general problem with the PISA technology relates to the claim that the test is culture-free or at least free of those cultural biases which disadvantage some types of learners at the expense of others. Cultural bias works in a number of ways. PISA test constructors use background material which is unfamiliar to some students being tested but familiar to others; test items have been taught in different ways to different groups of students being tested, that is, they have been given different values, or taught in a different order, or even not taught at all; and the testing technology may be unfamiliar to them because of factors which are peripheral to the articulation or use of the particular construct, but central to the testing technology used to assess it. Cultural differences take a number of different forms, such as, ascribing different values, and different strengths of values, to cultural items, or determin­ ing the nature, quality, probative force, relevance-value and extent of evidence, or

A History of International Organizations in Education

69

focusing on practices which may be more familiar to people in some countries and less so in others. However, more importantly, cultural differences with regard to the selection of test items refer to the expression of the problem to be solved. If, for example, different national idioms, different national ways of thinking embedded in language forms, and different normic values woven into the fabric of national discourses, are ignored, then the presentation of the actual test items as well as the range of possible answers that can be given may favour students from one nation at the expense of students from another. The extent of cultural bias in the PISA test is unrealized and certainly unreported. For example, Southern European girls performed less well than their male counterparts across the whole population of people being tested in relation to a question in the 2009 tests about a car lapping a race track. Some cultural dispositions disadvantage certain types of children, particularly in those countries where guessing is discouraged. An example, Gerald Bracey (2004) gives, is that French students preferred not to answer questions relating to personal experience, because they felt that such questions were not appropriate to the testing of academic knowledge. We are referring here to the problem of fair comparison. And in order to make a fair comparison, it may not just be a question of translating the words which are being used, that is, substituting one set (words, sentences and language structures) for another, but transposing the example and the problem, so that it better reflects its new epistemic base. Underpinning the notion of an international test is the idea of a universal, that is, culture-free, form of knowledge, which can be adapted so that superficial differences between nations are eliminated. However, it is never enough to say that a test simply tests the capacities and knowledge constructs of a group (in the case of PISA a transnational group) of students. What a transnational test does is make a number of reductionist assumptions about the knowledge bases being tested which result in imperfect caricatures of all the national knowledge bases under consideration. A fourth technical problem with PISA relates to its sampling procedures. If different types of sampling in the different countries are used, then some of these countries will be disadvantaged compared with others. Sampling issues are present in any test, whether we are referring here to selecting children from a number of grade levels and not specifying proportions from each grade, to selecting parts of countries for reporting purposes and ignoring the rest, as in the latest PISA tests (OECD 2014) where only the richest and better educated cohort of students was entered (from Shanghai), and these were allowed to represent China as a whole, to the selective (by the individual country) non-participation of some

70

Interventions in Education Systems

types of schools in some countries and not others. For example, in the 2009 tests, special schools were excluded in England but not in Germany. Bracey (2009) also suggests that there was a selective non-participation of students: ‘not only do schools need to agree to participate, students must agree too, and it is not clear how local culture and school regimes may have produced differential degrees of participation’. In Argentina some students handed in largely blank tests. If no incentive is attached to the taking of a test, that is, personal benefit such as gaining entry to a higher education institution, or monetary reward, or furtherance of a student’s learning trajectory, or national advantage, then the student is not likely to treat it very seriously. The value that they attach to it is always a matter of perception, rather than designation, and this means that different types of students will be motivated to do well to different degrees. PISA test constructors argue that these individual characteristics of test takers are accounted for at the level of the group, and the argument is then made that these characteristics, that is, a propensity to lose concentration in a test or not give a true account of their capacities because the examination technology offers them no incentive to do well, or having a presentational style which is at variance with the affordances of the examination technology, are randomly distributed among members of any group and therefore do not effect scores at the group level. As a result, groups can be reliably compared with each other. However, the assumption that these characteristics of group members are evenly distributed is false, and in addition, this is a measure of reliability rather than construct validity. Furthermore, these characteristics may be the defining characteristics of the group. A final technical problem with PISA is that the mechanism is not just descriptive but also has a performative element. In the use of a knowledge set, or in the performance of a skill, or in the application of a disposition, an internal transformation takes place. (In fact, both internal and external transformations are neglected within traditional psychometric accounts.) In contrast, within a person’s mind two knowledge sets are being activated. The first is the original knowledge set, and the second is the transformed set. Further to this, the transformed set may also at different points in time influence and transform the original set; that is, it has the capacity to bend back on itself and act recursively to change its original form. There is also an external transformative process at work, and thus testing a person’s knowledge, skills and aptitudes has specific washback effects on both the original knowledge construct, and the internally transformed knowledge

A History of International Organizations in Education

71

set ready for testing. The well-documented process of washback works in just this way (cf. Stobart 2009), so that instead of the assessment acting merely as a descriptive device, it also acts in a variety of ways to transform the construct it is seeking to measure. Washback effects work on a range of objects and in different ways. So, for example, there are washback effects on the curriculum, on teaching and learning, on the capacity of the individual and more fundamentally on the structures of knowledge, although these four mechanisms are frequently conflated in the minds of educational stakeholders. Micro-washback effects work directly on the person, whereas macro-washback effects work directly on institutions and systems, which then subsequently have an impact on individuals within those institutions and systems. For example, at a global level, policy enactments may lead to changes in national curricula and national systems of testing, which in time will lead to changes in curriculum and assessment at the level of schools and thence to changes in what is learnt and what an individual considers to be performative knowledge. What is considered to be appropriate performative knowledge has therefore changed as a result of changes at global, national and school levels. The argument is made by PISA test constructors that no internal or external processes of transformation occur when the knowledge, skills or dispositions of the person are tested, no change occurs to the original knowledge construct, or skill set or disposition, in order for that person to respond in the appropriate manner to the situation confronting them. We want to suggest that there is a transformative process. Consideration needs to be given to bidirectionality, incorporating forward and backward flows, so that the taking of the test and the recording of the mark impact on and influence the original knowledge construct. This changes the structure (both quantitatively and qualitatively) of the construct, and its affordances, making the original determination of it and them unreliable. This washback effect then has an impact on the curriculum, so that countries, regions or jurisdictions which do badly on the tests in one year either withdraw from the process or change their curriculum and its practices so that it favours the type of knowledge development which they feel better fits high performance in these international tests. One of these options then is withdrawal from the programme. An example of a country where this happened is India. Of the 74 countries tested in the PISA 2009 cycle, two Indian states (Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu) were placed in 72nd and 73rd position out of 74 countries which participated in both reading and mathematics, and 73rd and 74th position in science. The poor results in PISA

72

Interventions in Education Systems

were greeted with dismay in the Indian media. India withdrew from the next round of PISA testing, in August 2012, with the Indian government attributing its action to the unfairness of this testing process for Indian students. The Indian Express reported on the ninth of March in the same year that ‘(t)he ministry (of education) has concluded that there was a socio-cultural disconnect between the questions and Indian students. The ministry will write to the OECD and drive home the need to factor in India’s “socio-cultural milieu.” India’s participation in the next PISA cycle will hinge on this’. In June 2013, the Indian government, still concerned with the future prospect of fairness of PISA testing relating to Indian students, again withdrew India from the 2014 round of PISA testing. A test is always a performance. The taker of the test frames their response to the test in terms of what they perceive to be the correct answer. This operates at the unconscious level, and it is unremarkable. When we have a conversation with another person, we frame our responses and our mode of responding to how we think our messages are going to be received. With regard to testing, there is a further element, which is that the student taking the test frames their answers in terms of their perception of what they consider to be the correct response. If for example, there is some ambiguity in the question, the student asks themself the question: what type of answer should I give which is likely to result in the award of the maximum amount of marks? Test constructors aim to write questions or construct problems to be answered with as little ambiguity as possible. This is achieved (though rarely successfully) by reducing the scope of either the question/ problem to be solved or by reducing the response that the person taking the test is required to make, and this involves a reformulation of the knowledge construct, though it may still contain residues of its original form. PISA test constructors have chosen to measure competencies rather than knowledge sets on the grounds that the latter are specific to particular countries, whereas competencies have universal characteristics. There are two problems with this. First, those national and local features of knowledge domains apply in equal measure to skills, competencies (skills expressed as individual capacities) and dispositions (configurations of individual capacities which can be expressed as affordances). Second, there is a longer and more complex inferential chain involved in the measurement of competencies than there is in the measurement of knowledge acquisition, and there is therefore a greater likelihood of construct-irrelevance variance occurring. PISA has attempted the difficult task of constructing curriculum-free tests; the most notorious example being the 11  examination in the United Kingdom (cf. Torrance 1981, for a

A History of International Organizations in Education

73

critical evaluation). The reason for this is that making comparisons between the test performances of students from different countries, with different curricula and with different teaching methods and approaches, requires the selection of test items that do not reflect national curricula or national pedagogic methods. So these international comparative tests, and this includes items which refer to the socio-economic conditions of the student and attitudinal data (as in the 2009 PISA Science-focused set of tests), are not a measure of their curriculum, nor what they have been taught, nor are they a measure of what they have learnt in any formal sense. This means that the content of the test items and the presentation of those test items are likely to favour some countries at the expense of others. PISA results are expressed as comparative national tables rather than scores achieved by participants. The focus is on position rather than score, even though significant improvements made by one nation between two time points may be masked by improvements made by other nations. If you add to this the idea that there is some uncertainty or unreliability about the scores (i.e. marker error, poor performance by those being tested, cultural bias effects, epistemic differences, inability to transform internal knowledge into performative knowledge, etc.), it is hard to believe that such league tables can and do provide a nation with very much useful information. However, what we have here is a display mechanism. Furthermore, the instrument (PISA) is a performative device, in so far as its intention is not just to describe the skills and dispositions of children but to promote and thus contribute to national policy-making. Certain forms of performative knowledge become the norm. The instrument for measuring knowledge and skill levels of children becomes an instrument for determining what those knowledge levels and skills should be, and how they should be learnt. It operates as a standardizing device in relation to these matters (i.e. it creates a norm) and should not be understood as a device for making fair, reasonable and accurate judgements about the capacities of cohorts of students in different countries.

Research and evaluation studies In addition to its international testing programme, the OECD also undertakes research and evaluation studies in countries which request and pay for them. These studies result in a list of recommendations for making changes to the

74

Interventions in Education Systems

education system of the country concerned. At the end of the process after the report has been submitted, it is usual for a series of meetings to be organized by that country, where OECD staff explain the recommendations without discussing how they can be implemented. Implementation is considered to be the responsibility of the country concerned and the OECD only provides guidance about the possible effects of implementing these changes, should they be used as the basis for reforming the system. When the thinking shifted in the OECD to one that involved examining and advising about mainstream schools and making proposals and recommendations about performance and organization this meant that a rigorous methodology had to be developed for the reports and recommendations that were commissioned by member countries. The principal tasks consisted in compiling, analysing and disseminating relevant information and comparative data, as well as providing a relevant and appropriate set of criteria and co-ordinating activities. The OECD had already developed a methodology that they had been using for some time to produce economic reports for member countries. These research and evaluation studies have three distinctive phases. The first of these is inquisitorial where data are collected and key players interviewed by a team of experts selected by the OECD. A second phase consists of a meditative or review process where the report or reports of the inquisitorial team are discussed at the OECD headquarters in Paris, conclusions are reached and a list of recommendations drawn up. The final phase is the implementation phase and the responsibility for this remains with the commissioning country; but the OECD is willing to participate in conferences and workshops to explain their recommendations and help with the implementation process. However, before we discuss the activities in the inquisitive, meditative and implementation phases, we first need to examine the judgemental criteria that are used. There are two types: those developed within the OECD through their use in previous studies and those which have evolved officially and more importantly unofficially during the research and evaluation study and with the participation of the client state. The only reports we have about this complex and often invisible process come from the OECD. However, the criteria which are eventually used are central to the types of judgements that are eventually made about the education system of the country under investigation. We are suggesting that these criteria are not exclusively developed by the OECD, and further to this that their development is a co-production by the evaluator, the international body and the commissioning country.

A History of International Organizations in Education

75

With regard to the implementation process, the OECD feels that it should not participate in national and regional meetings and relies upon the host country to organize a rolling programme of discussion and presentation. It chooses not to be involved in the implementation process and its intervention is therefore restricted to convincing the host country to enact the recommendations that it has made. However, unofficial and unrecorded meetings do take place between the individual government and the OECD, and here the purpose is to advise the host country about what they should do next. In those cases where there is a shared and complementary vision between the OECD and government officials, if not a shared biography, informal discussions take place at all stages about priorities and, above all, about how to develop a strategy to overcome long-standing and entrenched obstacles to educational changes that need to be made. Moreover, reports tend to under-emphasize or even exclude altogether the work of small non-governmental organizations, which in the field of education usually tend to be the only organizations that can overcome local opposition and have the networks, understandings and status to implement the reforms. Often creative approaches to solving education problems come from such organizations, yet they have little influence on the list of recommendations that are ultimately produced. Official institutions are reluctant to deal with them and, in many cases, have scant knowledge of their work. Organizations like the OECD have even less contact and for those reasons such organizations are usually not mentioned in the reports. Having discussed the role of the OECD in these investigations, we now move to an examination of how the process actually works in practice. We do this through a case history of one such project in Mexico.

The natural history of an OECD project The steps the OECD takes to establish and realize an education project are both sensible and comprehensive. The OECD serves as a catalyst and guide during the inquisitive and meditative phases, and provides the time and space for, and further assistance in, organizing the proposals for change and reform. However, progression from inquisition through to meditation to action is logical but rarely works in this orderly way. OECD interventions vary according to the country with which the organization works; however, there are common features, and this allows us to understand how the relationship between the OECD and its

76

Interventions in Education Systems

member states operates and also to refine the notion of transnational governance, which some commentators (e.g., Hale and Held 2011) have suggested, is the logical outcome of these interventions round the world. It is important to remind ourselves at the outset that the design of these interventions was originally predicated upon a general similarity in the socio-economic structures of the core member states. As the OECD expanded its membership the methodology remained broadly the same, even though many newer members had more complex socio-economic and political systems. The following example is drawn from one of those states, Mexico. In 2007, Mexico, a member state of the OECD, was concerned about its poor performance in the PISA examinations. The press, the opposition parties and even organizations that were part of the fragile coalition that governed the country were critical of this poor performance. The government that had only been recently elected wished to show that it understood the reasons, and could compensate, for past failures in the education system. However, its actions were circumscribed by its relations with organizations and groups with different and conflicting aims which were powerful enough to veto any innovations that might threaten their interests. This government had to steer a course between promoting change and maintaining social equilibrium or at least engaging in change at a pace that would not threaten its political arrangements. An initial step in that direction was to attempt to explain the reasons for the low position of Mexico in the PISA examination league table and then to develop a series of recommendations which would, if they were implemented, reverse this. It was also felt that they could not commission a team to do this work from Mexico, as there wasn’t an appropriate body available, capable and disinterested enough at the time, and the recommendations would be more powerful if they came from the international organization that coordinated the PISA process and which also had representatives of the commissioning country within its borders. So the Mexican authorities turned to the OECD, with the proviso that the terms of reference for the research and evaluation study would be drawn up by the commissioning country. The Mexican government therefore commissioned the OECD to prepare a report outlining the reasons for its low position in the PISA league tables and to suggest some possible remedies. The OECD, in turn, as was their normal practice, commissioned a team of experts, drawn largely from the academic world and institutions that administer educational reforms, to prepare a report. The team was given considerable leeway by the OECD because several of its

A History of International Organizations in Education

77

members had an excellent track record of dealing with such problems and these members were known to respect OECD precepts and guidelines. At this point the Mexican government contacted the team, as a group and individually, to reach agreement with them that they would operate within these precepts and guidelines and respect the integrity of the country’s education system. Visits to carefully selected institutions, and interviews with a variety of stakeholders, were arranged by the host country. At every stage discussions took place between the team and their hosts. Sampling procedures and interview protocols were agreed with the commissioning agency, that is, the Mexican government. While the OECD team had complete freedom to take evidence from a wide range of stakeholders and researchers, the host country often insisted on further interviews taking place with representatives of groups and agencies who were known to favour the status quo and block meaningful curricular, pedagogical or institutional reforms needed to improve the performance of the system. During this crucial stage of the proceedings close contact was maintained between the team and the Mexican government, who were therefore able to influence how and what information was collected, and indeed how it was analysed. This meant that the power of the commissioning agent was such that it largely determined the conclusions that could be drawn from the data that were collected. Activities in this inquisitorial phase were therefore managed through the office of the commissioning agent, the Mexican government, and not by officials from the central offices of the OECD. Most of the researchers had little previous experience in Mexico and the one person who did have experience of the country accepted that she had to work within these limitations and was persuaded that this was the only way in which meaningful educational reforms could be implemented in a country such as Mexico. At the same time local researchers who were questioned took a similarly cautious approach based on the not erroneous notion that any strategy laying the basis for change was better than a continuance of the existing situation. The next phase was the preparation of the report and the development of recommendations. An immediate problem occurred when some members of the team decided that they did not want to make recommendations. Another problem was that the Mexican government wanted a list of recommendations that were both acceptable to them and moved in a direction that would remove blockages to reforming the system. In the end, as we will see, the commissioning government in Mexico prevailed because it published the report against the advice of the OECD. The latter didn’t want to publish the report because they

78

Interventions in Education Systems

felt that it made exaggerated claims and raised issues that went beyond what they took to be their original agreement with the Mexican government. This is curious because the Mexican government accepted at least nominally the recommendations. The OECD was reluctant to publish because they felt that the report incorporated a model of teaching and learning of which they disapproved. Equally significant is how little understanding the OECD seemed to have of how the Mexican government operated. One reason for this apparent lack of understanding was because of internal divisions and dissension within the organization. As we have already suggested, OECD staff in Mexico would have been appointed by the Mexican government, and their reappointment would depend upon how their work was received. What all this suggests is that there is no evidence in this particular case that the transnational body, the OECD, acted in any way that is commensurate with the idea of transnational governance. The Mexican authorities appeared to favour the recommendations because they published them without the consent of the OECD and they decided which of the recommendations they would in practice accept. Ignoring those recommendations which focused on institutional reform, they opted for addressing curriculum issues by developing curriculum standards. Simultaneously they skilfully involved the OECD in the process by commissioning them to run a series of workshops and conferences in Mexico. The OECD workshops and conferences focused on educational quality standards and assessment, and, as we will see, they also commissioned another report from the OECD (2012). The participants in the workshop were carefully selected by the Mexican authorities who were concerned to promote their new policies, and pave the way for institutional reforms. The OECD, in its turn, was committed to a trickle down process of implementation, where those who participated would persuade others and this would spread to all the stakeholders. However, those invited to these conferences were not always the best people for this activity because they were already in favour of the changes proposed by the Mexican government, and, while it can be argued that the conferences buttressed their position, they did nothing to overcome the mounting opposition to their educational reforms. It did serve as evidence that the government was trying to overcome the educational gridlock but in the end they left behind little of lasting significance. Indeed unofficial discussions were held with OECD officials as to how they could overcome the continued opposition of the largest player in the game, the official trade union, and here the OECD demonstrated its willingness to take steps to reward that organization were it to comply.

A History of International Organizations in Education

79

Eventually in 2012, and sometime after the Mexican government had first released the report, the OECD published a new report with their own list of recommendations (OECD 2012). This comprised the following:

1. Sustain efforts to strengthen evaluation and assessment and place greater emphasis on their improvement function. 2. Integrate the evaluation and assessment framework. 3. Adjust the governance of the evaluation and assessment framework. 4. Significantly invest in evaluation and assessment capacity development across the school system. 5. Ensure a coherent and comprehensive strategy for the implementation of the curricular reform 6. Develop strategies to address the detrimental effects of ENLACE. 7. Promote the formative use of standardized student assessments. 8. Consolidate teacher appraisal with the development of a medium-term vision. 9. Implement teaching standards to guide teacher appraisal and professional development. 10. Aim for a greater balance in the long term between the summative and formative functions of teacher appraisal. 11. Ensure states are actively engaged in teacher appraisal and give a more prominent role to school leaders. 12. Develop a long-term plan and take action to introduce a comprehensive and objective system of school evaluation. 13. Shift the focus of school directors’ work towards learning and improvement and develop a detached system of school leadership appraisal. 14. Report on the quality of schools in ways which are supportive but have impact for schools and for policymakers at state and federal levels. 15. Expand the school information system and make more meaningful comparisons across schools. 16. Optimize the reporting and use of system-level data to inform policy and practice. 17. Respond to information gaps in the national monitoring system. 18. Continuously review the Examen Para La Calidad Y El Logro Educativo (EXCALE) and ensure its relevance in relation to national education goals. What is noteworthy here is the generality of the recommendations, which might indicate compromises were made between the commissioning agent, the

80

Interventions in Education Systems

Mexican government, and the research and evaluation team from the OECD, and in addition, the implausibility of them, given that they exhibit contradictory tendencies, as in the seventh recommendation: ‘promote the formative use of standardized student assessments’. The OECD report made much of the virtues of PISA and, in addition, criticized Mexico’s national system of examination (ENLACE) that measured the ability of pupils to reproduce what they were taught rather than use it critically. In parallel and without informing the OECD the Mexican authorities commissioned at least three organizations to prepare curriculum standards. These three organizations were an extra-national university-based organization which specialized in education, another group from a Mexican research organization and a third group composed of experienced staff in the Ministry’s curriculum department. The groups were kept apart and worked in isolation. The extra-national group prepared a lengthy report on curriculum standards (Scott et al. 2012). The report was accepted but never implemented. The national research organization’s report was never completed. The Ministry curriculum department’s report consisted of critiques of these other two reports and recommendations for reform which were never used, as they sought to reconcile their view of curriculum standards with the national examination, ENLACE. In the end, little was achieved and the administration then ran out of time, as a new President was elected. Seeking to satisfy the growing voice of international criticism, criticism at home, and the voices of overlapping and contradictory national agencies, the Mexican authorities, in the end, found it impossible to implement any of the recommendations.

Interventions and experiments As we have shown, the OECD’s intervention process consists of three steps: the inquisitive, the meditative and implementation. During the inquisitory, or information gathering phase, research is undertaken that consists, in part, of collecting appropriate data and questioning relevant stakeholders in the country concerned. The researchers are not normally members of the OECD staff but carefully co-opted from a pool of experts who work in appropriate research and development organizations. They make site visits, collect data, sift through the material and produce a national report, and, in some cases, provide orientations for policy and suggestions for reforming the system.

A History of International Organizations in Education

81

Nonetheless, as Halsey et al. (1957) informs us, the inquisitory phase consists largely if not exclusively of interactions with Ministry representatives and some carefully selected regional representatives and agents of interest groups who generally support most if not all the government’s policies. The research team is dependent upon the commissioning country for its data and the quality of that data is variable. While theoretically it could be possible for the OECD to put forward the names of researchers and local stakeholders who do not offer whole-hearted support for government policies, it is very difficult for the OECD to know who these people are and to implement such an agenda. Indeed, the methodology which best describes the process is a modified snowballing technique. Mustering unofficial as well as official contacts and then filtering their suggestions through national officials and engaging in a process of negotiation is its essence. There is an unspoken assumption that, in the end, the views of national officials are paramount. The next phase, the meditative, is also problematic. It is at this point that reforms and experiences are assembled into a policy package by a team at the OECD headquarters. The team is composed of relevant outsiders and local representatives with experience in the educational world and co-ordinated by OECD officials. One example of this is the policy-learning networks which involve selected members of civil society. Again, these tend to be leaders of interest groups working with government departments and while not necessarily agreeing with officials they have more in common with them than not. The outside experts are often hampered by not knowing the country intimately and are reliant upon local government officials, unless, as in some rare cases, they have access to non-governmental organizations and groups outside the mainstream. However, the meditative group finds it impolitic to take evidence officially from these individuals and groups. Hence, while one can speculate that the OECD is a creator, purveyor and legitimator of ideas and reforms it is important to understand how these ideas pass, as we have seen, through several filters constructed by the national government with which the organization is working. At times this is very frustrating experience for OECD staff fully aware that their proposals are not being transmitted to those who ought to consider them if they are to be productive and stand a chance of implementation. This frustration refers to their lack of control over how, under what circumstances, and to what extent, the national filters distort their work, so that the final recommendations and suggestions are less helpful than they were intended to be.

82

Interventions in Education Systems

Setting an international benchmark does not mean that it will be accepted or not significantly modified. First of all, the client state shapes the recommendations by filtering them through a political prism. Suggestions are made to the effect that the recommendations must be limited to those that do not offend too many stakeholders yet nonetheless leads towards their eventual enactment. The next filter is the way the reports are translated for the potential actors. Finally we find that those responsible for putting the reforms into effect do not necessarily do so or do so in an attenuated form.

Extra-national interventions We have suggested that international organizations, particularly those that have an important role in educational research and development, work within global environments which can be characterized as collections of independent nation states working with and sometimes against each other. This means that there are always tensions between globalization pressures and national priorities. In the light of the dominant economic paradigm’s requirement for an efficient and universal system for selection, the OECD, as an organization with a global reach, devised a mechanism for measurement and comparison (i.e. PISA). The OECD works with the understanding that the information which it collects acts as a spur to individual nations, whether members or not, to allow them to make adjustments to their educational systems, though this is only occasionally realized in practice. This shows the importance of examinations like PISA, which we have focused on in this chapter, as well as ways of evaluating how education institutions function and how curricular, pedagogic and evaluative practices can be developed. Behind this notion of universalization lies a curious de facto similarity of views between those who adhere broadly to the principles of neo-liberalism and market-dominated economies, and those who stress the need for individual countries to take radical measures to promote community-based development in poor rural and urban areas. The former’s concern is with opening up labour markets, while the latter is concerned with making significant changes in the social division of labour involving a transfer of decision-making processes. The tension between these two concerns is ever present within the OECD and other international organizations and vitiates both their policies and their policy-making.

A History of International Organizations in Education

83

We have hinted that the workings of organizations like the OECD reflect these problems and tensions. The agreed line is arrived at after intense discussions and sometimes it means taking the path of least resistance. By extension and for that reason it is important to understand what occurs within these organizations and to have knowledge of the disputes and many levels of discussion and compromise that take place in the formulation of policies. There are often clashes that arise from ideological differences and from various kinds of pressure exerted on researchers and planners by their native countries. This dissonance can often lead to policies that have contradictory elements, and these were more than evident in the final package of reforms drawn up by the Mexican government in response to the OECD’s recommendations. Here we have been addressing the issue of vernacular globalization which is a process of policy and practice convergence between the national and the international, but one which understands the pre-eminence of the local and the national over the global. This can occur in a number of ways. The first of these is through a process of policy-borrowing or policy-learning, where the individual country is the recipient of policies from other countries or from a collection of other countries, and where discursive and institutional control is exercised by national, regional and local governments. The second way is through the direct impact of supranational bodies which have power and influence over member countries and which are seeking the harmonization of national educational policies and practices, but which again may be resisted, and there are a plethora of opportunities for this at the national level. The third is more subtle, and this is where the supranational body doesn’t only deal in converging policies or practices but in a common currency of comparison. This mechanism is harder to resist. The fourth process, which potentially allows convergence, is the autochthonous response of each national system of education to a common imperative from outside its jurisdiction. Within this process globalization pressures are mediated through national and local concerns, interests and preoccupations. We have illustrated these processes by examining two modus operandi of the OECD: the publishing of international league tables of educational achievements and research and evaluation studies undertaken by the OECD and commissioned by national governments. We now present our four country cases. The first of these is Mexico (Chapter 4). This is followed by England (Chapter 5), Singapore (Chapter 6) and Finland (Chapter 7).

4

Corporative Change in Mexico

We focus in this chapter on the Mexican education system, and we suggest that the institutions that manage contemporary Mexican society render unworkable meaningful education reform. Mexico has evolved as a corporative society where social, political and economic power is shared among the various competing power groups, none of which are able to obtain hegemony over the others. In such a society even economic aims are sacrificed to preserve the social order. Such a system is based on intricate compromises worked out between these groups. Selection or promotion is achieved through networking, usually funnelled through a single agency such as a political party or a quasigovernmental organization. Hence, any initiative or programme, whether to achieve greater stakeholder participation in education, to design a new national curriculum, to redesign teacher education programmes or to develop useful systems of assessment and evaluation, passes through these institutional filters, where the elite members of these powerful organizations amend, change and reconstitute these programmes. They normally do this while appearing to follow the programme’s stated aims. Sometimes, the system of informal negotiations within and between institutions leads to paralysis with little being achieved. A key term that we use here is networking. A corporative system of social and economic government relies on a system of networking, established by co-opted and sometimes specially created social groups and organizations. Networking refers to the complex system of sanctions and rewards, and of mutual help and promotion within family units, and, by extension in Mexico, to political family units. The anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz (2000) used the term in relation to Mexico to describe the survival of marginalized social groups and it can easily be extended to encompass the complex system of relations between groups whose first priority is the avoidance of conflict. This process of forgoing immediate interests for a complicated process of negotiation and reward is the key to

86

Interventions in Education Systems

understand how the education system functions in Mexico. Networking is both formal and, more importantly, informal, and it refers to the distribution flows of material and symbolic resources within the society, and within Mexico’s system of state education.

Historical background These corporatist social arrangements reach back to the formation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth century after nearly three centuries of Spanish rule. More recently, following the civil war of the Mexican revolution, the National Revolutionary Party (PRI) was formed with the intention of unifying the warring factions. As a result, peasant organizations, nascent working-class organizations, local authorities, and a small middle class, were integrated into the society. The Secretariat of Public Education was created in 1921 at the end of the revolution. Its principal architect, José Vasconcelos, saw its main task as being to educate and civilize the people of Mexico and shape its population into a nation. This was to be achieved through the creation of a centralized government and a strongly regulated education system. The themes of centralization versus diver­ sity, and incorporation via the redistribution of power and benefits, run through the whole history of modern Mexican education, right up to the present. In many ways education became both the real and metaphorical battleground for policy because it was assigned contradictory tasks and its administrative protocols and operations often restricted its effectiveness. The massification of education at all levels led to greater competition for positions, which alarmed those concerned with the maintenance of social order. Gradually the middle classes began a process of withdrawing their children from the state sector by setting up large numbers of primary and secondary independent schools, establishing new private universities, and creating secondary schools as appendages of these universities. Their effective abandonment of the system was to lead to long-lasting divisions in Mexican society, as has happened in other nations where the children of the elite groups in society are withdrawn from the public education sector. If one of the hallmarks of Mexican politics has been the reconciliation of different, often conflicting interests, the Secretariat of Education became the one real battleground where compromise between the sectors of the party was difficult to achieve and maintain. If the role of education was to provide the

Corporative Change in Mexico

87

independent and creative thinking necessary for economic development, then a number of ideological and administrative impediments would have to be removed. That was unthinkable and created a level of tension between innovators and more consensually oriented administrators who blocked the development of new programmes. The administration of the Ministry itself, and of its satellite organizations, was shared with the corporatist organization representing the teachers, the trade union (El Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación – SNTE). Over many aspects of policy the teachers’ union effectively had a veto over whether particular policies were implemented or not. The SNTE itself was often divided and at war with itself and this frequently led to stalemate, resulting in largely inconsequential programmes of study, the inability to translate programmes into actions, the suppression of research reports and the evolution of an administration whose role became one of negating and marginalizing initiative and change. Indeed, educational problems were rapidly translated into administrative problems and as a consequence never resolved properly. During the 1970s the trade union undertook a campaign to have salaries raised to a high enough level, so that teachers would not feel compelled to take on a second job. Because of financial stringency the Ministry of Education was not able to comply and after intense political discussions at all the levels of the organization, the Secretary of State for Education offered to reduce the number of school hours for students, and at the same time, promised that there would be no reductions in teachers’ salaries. Few voices were raised against this change to teachers’ conditions of service, but the net effect was, not only, as Carlos Ornelas (2008) has pointed out, a ‘dumbing down’ of the education of the majority of students, but also a mass exodus of the middle classes from the state sector into schools which provided more than four contact hours a day. So, teachers were persuaded to accept a barely adequate pay settlement, even though they knew that the quality of teaching and learning programmes in schools would be reduced. The right of tenure for the teaching workforce also proved to be another source of conflict between the trade union and the government. The tenure that teachers acquire early on in their careers in Mexico is considered by them to be an inalienable right, even though it has the potential to prevent reforms that might persuade teachers to undertake significant renewals of their practice. At the same time, tenure has secured teacher loyalty to the union. The government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) realized that economic and social agendas do not necessarily coincide, and opted for making economic reforms. When Mexico joined the North-American Free Trade Agreement and

88

Interventions in Education Systems

the OECD in 1994, this accelerated the trend. Economic liberalization allowed education to be better funded, and in part this was to prepare the labour force for an expansion of the economy. This in turn required the education system to be reformed, and an attempt to break the resistance of the official union to reforms took place when Salinas dismissed the lifelong union leader, Carlos Jonguitud. In the event, his replacement, Elba Esther Gordillo Morales, proved even more recalcitrant in the defence of her union power base. It had been hoped that the election in 2000 of a president representing the opposition for the first time since the 1910 revolution would lead to significant changes, but to no avail. After 2006 the power of the union (SNTE) increased and indeed, its members then occupied the key position of the Under-Secretary of Basic Education, as well as almost all the key education posts in the Mexican federation of states. We now turn to a discussion of the immediate and long-term consequences of this.

Contemporary Mexican education There is a saying in Spanish that is often invoked in Mexico to explain to bewildered foreigners a central aspect of Mexican public life: ‘a río revuelto ganancia de pescadores’. This extols the virtue of uncertainty in the tides of life in Mexico in such a way as to benefit anyone who can take advantage of an opportunity given to them unexpectedly. People often use it to describe the twists and turns of fortune in public life. This view of political unpredictability contrasts strongly with another recurrent theme, that of a strict legalistic and lumbering bureaucracy. The tension between rules and improvisation has been frequently discussed by social scientists in Mexico (e.g., Meyer and Benevot 2012) and it helps us understand better how the bitter and bloody conflicts of the Mexican revolution (1910–17) were resolved. Social scientists have pointed to the increasing centralization of power in the presidency on the one hand, and, on the other, to the drive to conciliate and incorporate rival leaders and regional forces in a binding national state with a strong presidency at its apex. For example, Peter Smith (1979) emphasizes the extent of the absorption into the body politic of the Mexican political elite, of which a vital and essential part was a presidency that was able to increase its control of the political and economic infrastructure. Any understanding of public administration in Mexico needs to take account of the power of these elite groups and their torturous negotiations with the presidency to which they were sometimes opposed. The

Corporative Change in Mexico

89

workings of the legal and regulatory structure of the public bureaucracies also has to be contextualized as operating within the more fluid networks of individual and group loyalties, and these determine more precisely how policies are developed and implemented on an everyday basis in the various national and state ministries of education. In Mexico, economic development was understood as requiring government control over physical and, more importantly, human resources, and, by necessity, proactive and not reactive policy-making, as was the norm in Europe when central planning was abandoned. The Education Ministry was particularly proactive in fulfilling the aim it was set when the Secretariat of Education was launched in 1917 to abolish ignorance, poverty and isolation and to assimilate diverse ethnicities into the national project. Such a project placed a premium on the vertical integration of the sector from teachers at the bottom, through to their managers at district and state levels, right up to administrators and policymakers at the national level. In this setting of vertical integration no space was allowed for conflicts between different interest groups such as teachers and bureaucrats; all of them were incorporated into a national centralized and centralizing process as is characteristic of a corporative society, and conflict was settled internally, within the Ministry itself. The way this has been achieved is far more through the play of group and individual loyalties at each level of the administration than through an imper­ sonal hierarchical bureaucracy based on objective criteria such as competitive examinations. In that sense the criteria for selection were social and political rather than through service examinations. Hence, the public administration of education echoed the pattern established in the post-revolutionary construction of the modern Mexican state (cf. Purcell and Kaufman 1976). So, although the formal organizational chart is important because it provides the architectural framework for the educational process, it cannot be taken as the real way policy development and implementation are realized. What we are suggesting here is that the complex and often opaque interplay between and within networks of political groups in varied and shifting positions of power is the essence of a corporate state. This is of primary importance for understanding how the system actually functions, how it organizes its work and how it deals with policy interventions from national and international organizations. In Chapter 1 we suggested that it would be a mistake to consider the modern nation state as an entity above history and uncontaminated by particular interests. Our point was that in Mexico, far from transcending

90

Interventions in Education Systems

particular interests, the conflict between different social interests was and still is the prime mover in the state’s formation (Migdal 2001). The nineteenth-century French positivist thinkers, particularly Auguste Comte [1856] (2009) and Henri de Saint-Simon (cf. Kirkup and Shotwell 1911), shrouded the idea of the state in an aura of neutrality and scientific objectivity, and this led to a notion of the expertise of technocrats. The Mexican positivists who flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century, called the Cientificos (cf. Hernandez-Chavez 2006), while insisting on the unique conditions of their own country, subscribed to the notion that in order for a country to make progress, it needed its own highly trained group of technocrats to preside over the development of its state apparatus. The sons and daughters of the elite filled those technocratic positions, having been educated in the newly opened national university promoted by José Vasconcelos. But even the most liberal and dedicated thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the architects of the modern Mexican state, showed a far from neutral attitude towards on the one hand, business and international capital, and, on the other, the poor. The former were courted and the latter treated as objects of derision and in need of civilizing influences. In the post-war period, the newly established and refurbished multilateral and international agencies of development were drawing up plans to accelerate the integration of emerging countries into world networks, ever mindful of the Mexican dilemma as to how to persuade the state to promote economic, political and social reform. Initially a workforce shortage was the priority to be addressed, followed by a strengthening of schools and higher education institutions. By the 1980s the direction education was taking shifted to a market-driven model in which it was to play the role of upskilling the workforce in order to increase production and compete more effectively at an international level. At the same time the government’s policy was to integrate the economy into the international markets. Problems occurred in the development of the education service that were increasingly attributed to administrative failures, which ushered in two decades of large-scale reform of the bureaucratic infrastructure. Throughout the whole post-war period, policy interventions tended to treat educational development shortcomings as deficits in training, experience and efficiency among the administrators and teachers. One can speculate that responsibility for this deadlock lies with the systemic inability to resolve the relationship between mechanisms of selection and control. In Chapter 1 we suggested that the relative importance given to these

Corporative Change in Mexico

91

two basic elements of an education service varies according to the structure of the social polity and the balance of forces between competing groups for power and influence. Societies in which economic competition is prioritized tend to put more weight, at least formally, on open competition. Hence the organization of education systems, both materially and symbolically, is generally open and the modalities of control are relatively weak. On the other hand, in societies where the maintenance of social order, as in the case of Mexico, is of paramount concern, there is a greater emphasis on control mechanisms in the education system. This has implications for policymakers, their perceptions and practices, and the research and knowledge development agendas they subscribe to. On the whole European countries have operated within the former system, with variations due to the periodic strength of oppositional forces and a complex and changing system of social alliances with the middle classes, often in alliance with working-class organizations. The history of Mexico, from its political revolution of 1910 to the present, provides us with an example of a system of education which emphasizes control, and in which the middle class never enjoyed a substantial level of independence, being beholden to the system itself for its continued existence. Hence, the Mexican middle classes were never in a position to turn control mechanisms into power structures and were never able to forge alliances outside their sphere of influence. This resulted in corporatism. Under these conditions, and despite the reforms and the ambitious pro­ grammes set out by the post-2000 government, the state was not able to provide the most basic resources to make schools function effectively. On average, primary school classrooms accommodate in excess of 40 pupils. Classrooms are cramped, noisy, badly ventilated and lack basic equipment. The actual time spent working in the classroom rarely exceeds two and a half hours per day. Almost all schools lack sufficient material resources and equipment. Most teaching environments are pedagogically flawed and teaching is of a poor quality. A sizable proportion of teachers who work double shifts (due to low salaries) have excessively long working hours that in addition require them to sign up for weekend training courses. Pre-service and in-service teacher training is of poor quality. All of the above would appear to confirm the long-standing international deficit model. Yet Mexico spends the recommended minimum millennium goal of 5 per cent of GDP. Indeed, spending on education is the highest among OECD countries as a proportion of GDP and almost twice as

92

Interventions in Education Systems

high as the OECD average level (OECD 2010a). And yet there is a massive policy implementation failure in Mexico. Even where policymakers have focused on administrative issues they have tended to understand them in deficit terms to be resolved by routine training programmes. What has been lacking is a more fundamental grasp of the way bureaucracies work in different states. This was something that the positivist and post-revolutionary critics, notably, Silva Herzog (1964) and Daniel Cosío Villegas (1972), pointed to. But the issue has been difficult to understand in no small measure because it requires these very critics to examine their own position in relation to policy-making and the bureaucracy that has the responsibility for implementing these policies. Here we return to the idea that the state is not independent of sectional interests in the public sphere. In addition to these in-school needs, we find the following more general needs identified by reports commissioned from international agencies (e.g., the OECD 2007a). These ranged from there being no unity of purpose among the system’s stakeholders, to there being no clarity about standards in literacy, numeracy and science, with the curriculum in the classroom poorly organized. Some have suggested that assessment is not sufficiently related to the curriculum and does not provide formative information for learning purposes; and that there is only sporadic support for teachers and not enough attention is paid to enhance the quality of the teaching. Others suggest that there is a need to improve school leadership, and that the relationship between the federal ministry, the state and the schools is byzantine in its complexity. The continued failure to address these issues despite government attempts at administrative reform and the development of new curricula, pedagogies and systems of evaluation, requires an explanation and a possible remedy. In Mexico, and internationally, experts have tended to look to the central administration to resolve these problems. Indeed, it has been suggested that the very arrangements that were designed to reconstruct the modern Mexican state, namely the incorporation of the different parts of the public service bureaucracies into a unified chain of command, have failed to deliver any real improvement. On the surface the Secretariat in Mexico City is assumed to have the power to effect change through its management of the 32 state administrations. However, as we will see, it is divided in itself and policy is broadly determined not according to its procedures but by unofficial networks involving active corporative stakeholders. This means that the lack of administrative coherence is, in part, responsible for the existing problems

Corporative Change in Mexico

93

remaining unresolved, with its actions circumscribed if not directly subverted by the informal systems that predominate. Recently, the administration initiated a programme of reform in response to external criticisms by giving staff a more secure status with the intention of making them less subject to political changes. However, the political coherence these reforms were aimed at producing has been cosmetic. The higher posts continue to be transitory political appointments awarded on the basis of shifting alliances. These appointees bring in teams that often contradict the permanent staff whose work is effectively redefined as providing support for policy changes, and this seems to occur with every change in upper echelon appointments. The process of deciding these upper echelon appointments occurs through negotiations with the main stakeholders and particularly the trade union. The opportunity for conflict is thus increased and often, as we will see, different sections within the ministry are in conflict with each other. In fact, even the permanent posts are far from permanent. The method of selection of personnel is little different from the method of selecting political appointees, and, in addition, there are three groups of permanent staff: those who are fully permanent usually through their contacts with the trade union, those who are appointed to temporary permanent posts, the majority, and those who are permanent for the duration of a project. The various attempts at civil service reform have complicated the situation. So closely allied are the various parts of the corporative state that it is difficult to separate out corporate roles, patrimonial loyalties and obligatory member­ ship of the dominant party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The official teachers’ union became a part of the public administration, the latter granting pay deals and political favours to the former in return for controlling their members. This closed, impermeable system, an extreme case of political clientelism, has created a distance between state education and those it is supposed to serve, its users, potential users and those who have left the system. In order to grasp the way in which the bureaucracy affects policy implementation we need in the first instance to abandon the widely held notion that state bureaucracies run according to rational principles. The formal ministerial and departmental structures represented in the official organizational chart might suggest that they do, but we need to examine what really happens in the day-to-day life of an organization, and not just rely on what the organization claims that they do. This task is not helped by the claims made by senior members of the bureaucracy that the state conducts its business on a

94

Interventions in Education Systems

rational basis. However, close examination of their modus operandi produces an altogether different picture. It is not that there are no shared rules, but these have more to do with loyalty, patronage and types of reciprocity between individuals and groups than educational concerns. As we suggested in Chapter 1, there is a variety of state formations and organizations. The modern British state emerged from being reactive to economic development at home and in its colonies, whereas the new developing states have been more proactive. Their promoting of economic growth has drawn the political elites into a closer relationship with powerful economic forces as in the rentier state and in states where politicians move between government interests and the business opportunities that these positions provide (Cowen and Shenton 2003). In the educational sector, control over resources allows officers to wield power over their use and to trade on this form of control. The second consideration relevant to policy implementation has to do with ‘the rules of the game’, the mattering maps (cf. Migdal 2001), that guide interactions between actors according to implicit and shared meanings. This is important in understanding patronage in the Mexican public administration. Patron-clientage or patronage has been widely discussed in relation to Latin American bureaucracies. In Mexico it has accompanied the creation of a corporative national enterprise, each sector vertically integrating its members and culminating in top-level leaders and politicians. Most of the senior officials in the system are appointed by top-level politicians; these are called positions, de confianza, or of trust. This phrase illustrates the fundamental principle of the administrative order, namely that a leader will rely more on individuals whose loyalty they can command, rather than through objective and open selection and monitoring of subordinates. In return for loyalty, subordinates rely on their patrons to guide them through the bureaucratic labyrinth and even for their career development. Senior officials will tend to see new policies in terms of their opportunity to control more human and material resources and their own advancement together with their team. As such, when there are changes of government with their attendant shifts in policy and even internal reshuffles, the official often take their team to their next job. Mutual responsibilities between patrons and clients override loyalties to their profession or to the public service itself. Recent attempts to create a neutral civil service have had to confront the power of vertical patronage. The best way of illustrating the role of corporatism, patronage and personalized political negotiation is through describing a critical incident of the University of London’s involvement in a curriculum standards project with the National Secretariat of Education (SEP) in Mexico.

Corporative Change in Mexico

95

The setting of curriculum standards We start with a brief account of this project. In 2007 the OECD published a report that attempted to outline the reasons behind the continued poor performance of Mexican students in the PISA examination (cf. Hopkins and Posner 2007). This was followed by a more wide-ranging report published in 2010 (cf. Hopkins and Posner 2010). One of the recommendations was the need to develop curriculum standards, and this was the one point on which the teacher union and the National Secretariat of Education agreed, disagreement over all the other issues resulting from a long-running dispute between the union leadership and the current leaders of the Secretariat of Education over the recently reformed curriculum. The standards issue provided an opportunity for some conciliation. But each side understood it differently. Senior officials in the newly elected 2006 government understood the establishment of curriculum standards as a way of subordinating teachers to clear curriculum expectations. For its part, the other faction of the secretariat, allied with the union, understood their championing of standards as pre-empting its control over their members. Indeed they claimed it was their idea. The union, in return, declared that it had supported the ENLACE test, a yearly, multiple choice, examination to gauge pupils’ progress, which was to become the signature policy of the new government. In 2010 a team from the University of London was commissioned to undertake research into the possibilities for developing curriculum standards in the Mexican Basic Education System.1 After undertaking initial research on the curriculum, the team met with representatives of the 11 pilot states in Mexico City. Previously, teachers and headteachers had been consulted, as had subject heads, senior officials and union leaders in the 11 states. At the national level, the SEP colleagues were mainly the officials in the relevant departments that included an influential figure in the national union of teachers. Halfway through the project a large meeting was held that included a number of officers and union delegates. Additionally, a key department that thus far had not been involved was invited, resulting in resentments that emerged later on. The Undersecretary of Basic Education inaugurated the proceedings. The main purpose of the meeting was to spell out the meaning and purpose of curriculum standards. That was complicated by the existence of a similar notion, expected learning outcomes, already included in the reformed curriculum. The team’s job was to distinguish standards as markers at each key stage of the curriculum from the more prescriptive and frequent evaluation points increasingly linked to the ENLACE tests. The team was at pains to point out

96

Interventions in Education Systems

that standards were not supposed to make teachers and students accountable, unlike the expected outcomes, but to guide formatively the teaching and learning process through a curriculum cycle. Right at the beginning of the meeting, confusion about these differences emerged. On the basis of the research that had been conducted, the team’s chief advisor explained the purpose of standards, while the Undersecretary insisted that standards reinforced the ENLACE tests, which he accepted were unpopular because of their accountability impli­ cations. His linking of the University of London’s proposed standards with ENLACE entirely contradicted their approach that wanted to maintain the formative nature of standards. This meeting made explicit the differences between the respective agendas; the University of London’s reputation depended on its recommendation of internationally recognized best practices that at this time was moving against standard assessment tasks, just at the time Mexico was adopting them. On the other hand, the SEP-SNTE ministry group wanted to convince teachers of the need to make standards a tool for improving teacher and pupil performance in ENLACE, as was made evident in the Undersecretary’s presentation. In doing this, the message to the teachers was that standards would help them to improve their ENLACE results. The Undersecretary had three purposes. The first was to deliver the Secretariat policy, which promoted high-stakes testing and topdown forms of accountability. The second was to conform to the national teacher union’s agenda that was arguing for a professionalization of its members, and suggest that this project could be advanced through the adoption of these measures; and the third was to make these two actions palatable to the rankand-file teachers. He uniquely personified the intermeshing of the union and the administration since he was a teacher, the son-in-law of the lifelong leader of the teachers’ union, and now the head of the most important Undersecretariat of the Federal Education System. His position encapsulated a deep conflict of interest. The University of London’s preliminary research had revealed that the two main causes of teachers’ disaffection were first, the incompatibility and resulting confusion between the reformed child-centred curriculum that had been inaugurated in the previous administration and the current emphasis on measurable results; and second, the clumsy and rushed implementation of the recent curriculum reform. If the new curriculum was broadly accepted for its more creative approach to learning than in previous reforms, ENLACE was controversial because of its external accountability overtones. The University of London team presented these findings to a disbelieving audience. The teachers

Corporative Change in Mexico

97

that the University of London had interviewed had been upset by the latest curriculum reforms and their hasty implementation, but they had been even more perturbed by perceived corruption at all levels and the autocratic beha­ viour of the leaders of their teacher union and the Secretariat. At the end of the first part of the meeting where the University of London’s findings were presented, a senior union officer told the disgruntled teachers that they needed to swallow the unpalatable reflection on their profession that was captured in the research and accept the Undersecretary’s reform agenda, reminding them that the union had promoted the standards aspect of the reform. To summarize the morning’s proceedings we can identify two examples of corporate integration and control preventing the discussion of substantive educational issues. The first was the Undersecretary’s subordination of standards to the accountability agenda of ENLACE; the second was the marginalization of grass-root discontent over ENLACE and the implementation of the curriculum reforms through a call to support the current government reforms. In the afternoon an unexpected element of division appeared. Those responsible for the curriculum in the Curriculum Undersecretariat, who, surprisingly, the Undersecretary had not involved before, expressed their resentment at their previous exclusion. They attacked the University of London’s draft of standards, criticizing it for technical shortcomings and picked on an offbeat issue with respect to the science curriculum, namely the notion of scientific method. The Ministry curriculum team saw in this an unacceptable, Western, homogenizing definition of science. Meanwhile, in the working groups the University of London team faced the onslaught of the curriculum groups’ criticisms without any support of the authorities. They sought to explain the technical logic of their standards document, but to no avail. The preliminary draft was intended to invite discussion and input from all sides, but the tensions within the Curric­ulum Undersecretariat and between the Curriculum Undersecretariat and the University of London turned the intended discussions into a confrontation. Much of the internal conflict was displaced to the University of London. The University of London team soon realized that they were caught up in a larger interplay of internal Ministry forces and other international consultants’ recommendations of which they knew nothing. The specific changes to the curriculum document were secondary to the power dynamics; the substantive modifications to the standards proposal took place largely behind closed doors at a much later stage. Curriculum reforms in Mexico must overcome innumerable hurdles and then often fail because there is no way of putting them into effect.2 A special

98

Interventions in Education Systems

curriculum unit was set up to modernize the school curriculum in key areas in the 1990s, and attempts were made to involve all the interested parties. In several cases the curriculum was actually approved but in the end some of the organizations involved, like the trade union, subverted its implementation. More often than not this undermining of the curriculum reform was realized not through the official trade union but through the union’s local branches, which the central office claimed it could not control. At best the result was a stalemate. The net result is that permanent and near-permanent staff members in the ministry are placed in a difficult position. They must bear the brunt of criticisms concerning the lack of change but they are not in a position to do anything about it. Increasingly they become disillusioned and inured to attempts to reform policy and increasingly retreat to a defence of their reduced role. The non-permanent staff members, usually political appointees, are those who make the decisions. This results in hostility between them and their permanent staff, an example of short-term perspectivism. The constant barrage of new and sometimes contradictory programmes and projects affects schools and teachers, with their distinctive methodologies for intervention at the school level. Teachers respond by passively resisting, where nominally they accept the changes but in practice continue to conduct their business as usual.

Corporativism and patron-clientage It is difficult to generalize about how policy is delivered from the central offices of the Ministry of Education down the chain of command. It is not as straightforward a procedure as suggested by the official organizational chart. Individual state authorities have considerable leeway in their interpretation of policies that emerge from the central government. In many instances federal officials have to engage in sometimes tortuous negotiations with their counterparts in each of the 32 states to explain these policies and find ways of having them adopted. And this supports Ball’s (1994) notion of policy development, where he depicts education reform and policy-making as a messy, complex and contested enterprise. It is better understood as an object of contest and struggle between competing ideologies, education visions, personal interests and political or organizational positions. This results in misinterpretations and consequently ineffective implementations, and some­ times outright resistance.

Corporative Change in Mexico

99

Within the central ministry conflict between groups is difficult to manage. An Undersecretary and his subordinates are driven not only by loyalty to specific projects but also to the organizations that sponsor them. In the case of the development of curriculum standards, the Undersecretary decided to sponsor three different groups working on the same project to satisfy the different organizations to which he owed his loyalty. The General Director of Curriculum in the Ministry, in theory responsible to the Undersecretary, often persuaded one or more of these groups to oppose the Undersecretary because their own sponsoring group became aware of the fact that the proposed changes could damage its position. All bureaucracies rely to some extent on informal power networks. And as we have suggested, this is far more pronounced in Mexico because senior figures are almost always political appointees and therefore depend on the personal and political networks of their subordinates, as well as their own personal advisers who are drawn from their own sponsoring organizations. The staff and its entourage are often in conflict and this is compounded by mobilizing their counterparts in the federal and state offices. It is not uncommon to find them undermining each other. This not only supports clientelism over and against a formal meritocratically organized bureaucracy, but adds a further possible layer of difficulty. However, even in this personalized form of administration there are recognizable patterns or rules, but invariably these are unwritten. The first one is loyalty-responsibility, and this is implicit within patron–client relationships. The clients owe their position to the patron who thereby expects loyalty in return for support. The flow of favours and loyalty is not restricted to the specific bureaucratic environment, but is diffused. A client will be expected to work beyond their immediate administrative duties. Another dimension of clientelism is the subordination of efficient policy to the positioning of key actors in relation to each other within the overarching corporative structure. In contrast to this apparently binding subservience of client to patron, there is its opposite, opportunism. Survivors in the politicized public administration while manifesting loyalty cannot rely only on the continued good fortunes of their patrons. Government reshuffles mean that changes of personnel are frequent. Survival and promotion require clients to cultivate a wide range of potential patrons, in order to keep their options open. There are then two important patterns in Mexican political life; first, the pragmatism needed to survive for extended periods in the public sector, and second, the implicit distribution of positions by incoming and outgoing political leaders.

100

Interventions in Education Systems

Fernando Escalante (1998) argues that since its early formation, the modern Mexican state conceived of and represented its citizens as ideal-types that did not reflect the diverse reality of regions, languages and ethnicities. The gap between the ideal modern state and reality continued into the present. Basave (2010) further to this suggests that, as a result of their colonial heritage, Mexicans have had to negotiate two parallel systems: customary practices and colonialism. Elements of both of these continue to pervade the operations of Mexican public administration today and are ever present in the delivery of reforms. Frequently, we find a contrast between the written agreements expressed in legal terms and the actual way the projects unfold. In the curriculum standards project deadlines and meetings were constantly rescheduled and the commitment to having relevant stakeholders participating not only in the research phase of the project but, more importantly, in the construction phase, was sidelined after the first phase. At another point the Undersecretary without apparent warning suddenly inverted the non-punitive formative notion of standards to fit the accountability framework of the ENLACE agenda. In the case of the development of new curricula, the Undersecretary, supposedly committed to their development and implementation, at short notice cancelled the implementation programmes after the largest stakeholder group that had been party to their development withdrew support fearful of the reaction of its grassroots organizations. In both cases at various times conflict between sections of the federal secretariat and between the federal administration and some of the states was ever present. Not only were programmes impeded, delayed and sometimes cancelled but also staff became demoralized. Rather than understanding this duality as one of opposition and distance, the one being ideal and the other real, we suggest that each side is related to the other in a symbiotic manner. In the Mexican public administration, an official position in the formal organization chart denotes a place from which you can depose of material and non-material resources, services as well as power and influence. At the same time, the way these resources are managed depends both on personal expertise and on the informal networks of the patron-client. In terms of Mexican education, the most notorious and best documented example is that of the lifelong leader of the teacher union, Elba Esther Gordillo Morales. She is currently imprisoned, having been indicted on a charge of corruption and using her public position for private gain. It is claimed that she embezzled union dues to acquire expensive properties in Mexico and California

Corporative Change in Mexico

101

and invested large sums of money in foreign banks. What actually happened is in dispute, but the 2006–12 presidential administration owed her a debt because she provided a sufficiently large block of votes (principally teachers) for the candidate to win the election. It took her political enemies in the subsequent administration to mobilize the fiscal and judicial systems against her; the point being that the effectiveness of law and public accountability depends on the politics of the administration in power, and this, too, has a significant effect on how the system operates. We have examined here the operation of the system at the highest levels of administration. We now move to the level of the school, and how this impacts on the flows of policy-making and implementation.

Schools and classrooms We have so far explored how policy implementation is transformed in its path from policy-development through to implementation at the levels of the school and local authorities. We will draw upon research conducted in 11 Mexican states as well as participant observations in schools in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit (Scott et al. 2012). At the time of the research, the curriculum reforms that were enacted in the early 2000s were almost complete. Discontent with the implementation of the reforms, with the ENLACE examination, and with the abuses of their state and trade union leaders, was widespread but had not yet been openly expressed. Teachers themselves were broadly if at times guardedly in favour of the new curriculum. They welcomed its embracing of child-centred learning, more teacher pedagogical freedom and a departure from the old prescriptive and encyclopaedic curricula. Nevertheless, there were a number of institutional obstacles. In some of the states the trade union was in favour of the reforms and in other areas was opposed to the reforms, often for political rather than educational reasons. Within the state secretariats, the subject specialists, more often than not with specific training in the pedagogy of their subjects, were very much in favour because they had been involved in the consultative process that led to the development of the new curricula. However, resources were in the hands of level coordinators, who, with the exception of those responsible for pre-school education, had little training in subjects and were usually political and trade-union appointees. These officials controlled the budgets for the new reforms, unless the resource was specifically designated for the subject coordinators. Their interest was clearly related to satisfying the demands from

102

Interventions in Education Systems

the trade unions and other patronage groups. These competing interest groups and their negotiations with each other combined to produce an attenuated implementation process. This tokenism and draining of substance from a reform as it is implemented needs to be explained. There is a basic level of distrust between the government and the population. Teachers are fearful of the reactions of the users of the system because they do not want to admit that they have little control over the process. Administrators regard them as interlopers, as do the state and federal policymakers. In relation to the curriculum reform, the ENLACE evaluation reform, and the curriculum standards reform, we find that no one took seriously either the real administrative bottlenecks impeding communication between different levels and sections of the administration or between the administration’s vision of school reality and what actually happens at the school level. In interviews with top- and middle-level officials, administrators, who appeared to be seriously committed to the curriculum standards reform, were frustrated by a lack of coordination among different parts of the bureaucracy and the fact that those who were responsible for the reforms seemed unable to do what they were asked to do. For those working in the schools themselves the whole administrative edifice seemed remote and out of touch so as to make it impossible for the reforms to succeed. This combination of administrative inefficiency and a reality gap was exacerbated by the professional resentments that we have already referred to. One educational researcher, describing how schools react to reforms, made the point very clearly, drawing a picture of a school with the whole array of official demands crowding in on them, demonstrating that with the best of intentions the school could not reasonably cover the whole curriculum while meeting all of the often uncoordinated demands. Paradoxically, she contrasted the demands on the school with a corresponding lack of support, hence the continuous pressure on parents to contribute money, time and effort to make up the administrative shortfalls. Indeed, there is a raft of federal agencies that can communicate to local authorities and there is no real evidence of coordination among them in order to deliver a coherent message. Politics are not absent from this scenario. A new government often introduces initiatives that flatly contradict those of the previous government, even if they are both from the same political party. During the Fox and Calderón regimes one of the chief obstacles was the mismatch between the child-centred curriculum reforms that began at the pre-

Corporative Change in Mexico

103

school level during the Fox administration and the high-stakes testing regimes that completely undermined the reformed curriculum during the Calderón presidency. This conflict was played out within the federal Curriculum Undersecretariat offices in the transition between the two administrations, half of the secretariat consisting of experts from the Fox administration and the other half of Calderón appointees and their union allies. In the classroom, teachers were faced with the incompatible task of developing the students’ creativity in their classrooms and then drilling them for several weeks before the ENLACE and final grade tests. Because of its importance as a measure of pupil progress and the fact that it was devised independently from the curriculum reforms, the ENLACE examination is an example of how an educational system is affected when coordination between officials within the ministry and between the federal and state ministries is poor. Indeed, the signature educational programme of the Calderón administration was the ENLACE examination. As we have suggested, it was increasingly unpopular the closer it got to the classroom level, in part, because it was seen as contradicting the newly reformed curriculum, but mainly because it brought official scrutiny closer to the classroom. Teacher’s pay and benefits were affected by the 2013 ENLACE results, representing 50 per cent of their points. Teacher opposition took the form of passive resistance to the demands of the authorities and even to outright classroom cheating. ENLACE was designed as a crude high-stakes test for pupils and thus could not be mechanically applied to the performance of teachers. Moreover, it could not even be used to fulfil its main purpose (to evaluate and promote students from one grade to another), because results appeared too late in the school year to be taken into account in making these decisions. In short, ENLACE was obsolete and out of step with international best practices right from its inception. Towards the end of the Fox presidency the World Bank (2001) published a series of recommendations for Mexico for the new Millennium, four of them of direct relevance. The Bank recommended an auditing system in order to follow up policy implementation and to make civil servants accountable for their performance. It also considered it important to establish a civil service career pathway, so that officials would be promoted on merit, thereby reducing their dependence on patrons and all that this implies for the effective delivery of services. The other two relevant recommendations refer to accountability through freedom of information and civil society participation in public services. In the decade following this publication little has been achieved to

104

Interventions in Education Systems

make educational officials accountable to civil society. A career civil service was inaugurated during the Fox government but in the transition to the following administration, many career civil servants were summarily dismissed in the traditional way and others strongly encouraged to leave their posts.

Parental and community participation and educational policies Another example to illustrate the problems of implementation in Mexico is the role of parents and communities in schools and the education of their children. There are three general arguments in favour of the involvement of parents and the wider community in the day-to-day activities and running of schools and education systems. The first of these is that, if parents and the wider community are actively involved in their children’s education and in the management of the school more generally, educational performance improves (cf. Martínez 2009). To a large extent these improvements result from the school being able to draw on a wider range of skills that parents and the community can offer. And, second, given the importance of the school in equipping children with the requisite cultural capital and enhancing their life-chances, parents and the community have the right to influence curricular and pedagogic practices in schools. Third, in the Mexican case wider participation can open up a closed system. Traditionally, parental involvement is understood as a set of planned and deliberate actions, such as helping children with their homework and attending school organized events. These are individual actions; at the collective level, it has been suggested that parents could be involved in their children’s education by means of representation on policy-making committees and decision-making bodies at local authority or individual school levels (Alba et al. 2011). Epstein’s (2010) seminal work suggests three models of parental involvement: schoolbased participation, which consists of activities that are generally initiated by the school and take place there; home-based participation, which refers to activities normally initiated by the family and take place at home; and parent– teacher communications, which refers to exchanges of information between school and home with regard to students’ progress and school programmes. This typology is based on the assumption that in order to substantially improve educational achievement, adopting joint practices between schools, families and communities is both feasible and desirable, given that their areas of influence

Corporative Change in Mexico

105

overlap in children’s learning and development. This view diverges from the idea that schools and families have separate roles and functions in relation to children’s education. Parental involvement in lower grades in general has been found to be more significant in children’s learning and has contributed to lower dropout rates in high school (cf. Barnard 2004). Studies focusing on developing countries often report on parental contributions to school governance, particularly through decision-making and finance, but studies from more affluent countries focus on their contribution to children’s learning (cf. Edge et al. 2008). In the area of school governance, parental involvement is found to be valuable in, for example, providing financial assistance for schools, often used to improve school infrastructure. In the context of developing societies where schools lack basic facilities, this support is invaluable. This is often a popular form of parental assistance, but Lugaz and De Grauwe (ibid.) argue that it is a non-sustainable solution for school improvement and suggests parents should be given specific roles in relation to supervision and financial management, where this is feasible. Dearing et al. (2006) observed, in their longitudinal study, that increased parental attendance in meetings and events was linked to children’s improved literacy. Domina (2005) has however suggested that parents’ voluntary work at school has a greater impact on a child’s learning and behaviour than their involvement in trustee or parent–teacher associations, and this is supported by the claim that parents’ attentions are diverted from their primary role of educating children if they are asked to help manage schools. Parental participation in children’s learning can lead to increased motivation, concentration, attention and interest. Parenting skills, providing adequate nutrition, healthcare and the condition of the home also impact on learning capacity (Benjamin 1993; Hill 2001). Engagement in their children’s education leads to greater success when there is a clear understanding and approval of the educational process. Fan and Chen (2001) further suggest that parental expectations for children’s educational achievements, along with their support, are a strong predictor of their academic success regardless of gender and ethnicity. Factors relating to increasing parental involvement identified from the literature can be categorized into four areas (cf. Edge et al. 2008): parents’ motivational beliefs, whether parents can identify the approach and orientation of the schools, parents’ own educational backgrounds and perceptions, and teachers’ preparedness to collaborate with parents. In terms of motivational belief, parents were found to be motivated about their child’s education when they believed that they had a role to play

106

Interventions in Education Systems

(cf. Sheldon 2002), and had the confidence and a sense of efficacy about their role, although those perceptions were conditioned by social contexts (HooverDempsey et al. 2005). In some countries parents are now less constrained by the barrier of the ‘closed classroom door’. This occurs in different ways, for example, they may obtain detailed information about what happens at school via their networks with other parents, teachers and school administrators and, by doing so, they can customize their child’s educational experience, especially through home-based interventions that mirror school activities. Likewise, some parents interact with their child’s teachers to find out about academic opportunities so that they can influence their child. In this regard, the degree of parents’ social capital makes a difference. In addition to the advantages that some individual students have acquired from their parents’ social capital, the quality, duration and intensity of the interaction between parents and schools increases these educational advantages. Nonetheless, the findings suggest that this form of proactive parental involvement tends to be concentrated in middle-class families (Hassrick and Schneider 2009). This form of parental involvement increases the degree of scrutiny of both teachers’ practices and parents’ private lives to the extent that other adults find out about what parents do at home with their children. Such a dynamic therefore may have both positive and negative implications. For example, teachers can develop a level of trust with parents, and parents and teachers are more likely to collaborate about developing learning programmes for their child. Parents can act together to support teachers in a timely and focused way when they are well informed about classroom activities. Thoughtful parental monitoring of classroom activities can increase teachers’ responsiveness to their students’ needs. On the negative side, parental surveillance may act to undermine teachers’ professional judgements and practices. In addition, parents can exer­ cise pressure to seek outside input on the selection of curricular programmes without consulting the school staff, increasing the vulnerability of teachers and school administrators and decreasing their effectiveness. Jeynes (2010) has drawn attention to the fact that the efficacy of a school’s actions to foster parental involvement is likely to depend not so much on the specific guidelines and tutelage offered by schools to parents but on more subtle elements (which have been overlooked in the past), such as the extent to which teachers, school principals and school staff in general are ‘loving, encouraging, and supportive’ to parents. One suggestion by Jeynes is that a

Corporative Change in Mexico

107

parental involvement strategy instituted and maintained by the school is more important than parents teaching their child at home in isolation. Parental involvement tends to decline during adolescence in marked contrast with the preschool stage, though it has been suggested that a decline in parental involvement during students’ adolescence is often mistakenly regarded by teachers and school administrators as being caused by a lack of willingness of parents to support their children at such a critical age, rather than an inability to work with schools in the interests of their child (cf. Antonopoulou et al. 2011). Parental participation in the school environment is limited by the fact that they commonly work long hours and have multiple responsibilities (cf. Brandon et al. 2010). Six factors that are found to be particularly unfavourable to parental participation are distrust of the education system, apathy, personal constraints and stress, inflexible schedules, transportation difficulties and teachers’ dislike of different parenting styles. Edge et al. (2008) in their systematic review of the link between teacher quality and parental participation suggest that a primary determinant of parents’ involvement in their children’s education is the flexibility of their income generation; low-income families have significantly less time and flexibility to engage in such parenting activities. Interestingly, female parents who work part-time are found to be more involved than other parents in general, suggesting a link between maternal work and parental involvement. Berger and Riojas-Cortez (2012) make the point that for parental involvement and engagement to be effective, one of the many factors that needs to be in place is the cooperation of employers so that parents can have real opportunities to become involved in the learning processes of their children. Sergio Aguayo (2008) attributes the co-opted character of public life in Mexico to the social apathy parents display towards government institutions. In schools the absence of a two-way relationship between teachers and parents is an example of this. Bracho and Zamudio (1997) document the failure of Mexican parent–teacher organizations in these terms, arguing that they are not effective because parents are unaccustomed to voicing their opinions and intervening in matters that directly concern their children’s educational progress and welfare. Parents do participate in specific activities, like preparing and serving school breakfasts, cleaning classrooms and making financial contributions. They are also obliged to show up for official meetings. But here as elsewhere, their involvement is on the terms set by the school and there is no attempt to establish more egalitarian and participative partnerships. When

108

Interventions in Education Systems

parents want to express dissent or opinions contrary to those of the headteacher and the staff, they must come to terms with the fact that this runs the risk of reprisals against their children. From the teachers’ perspective, parental interventions are seen as complicating their already overburdened day and potentially creating problems with the educational authorities. What results is a ‘divorce of convenience’, where both parties seek to avoid all but the most minimal contact with each other. The 1993 Act (ANMEB) in Mexico consolidated a new relationship between the administration, the teachers and users of the educational system, and, through subsequent official agreements, between the key partners in the public education service. The government therefore responded at a surface level to the real involvement of service users, potential users and the wider society. Nevertheless, participation has been restricted to top-level academic consultative forums and the rubber-stamping of school programmes by officially created organizations such as parents’ associations. Policies such as more extensive involvements of parents in the education of their children are subverted in the Mexican context by the contingencies of the institutional setting in which they take place.

The unfolding of policy James C. Scott (2012) argues that the informality that appears to block policy implementation is caused by the top-down policy-making process itself. We have suggested that the unfolding of a policy from its initial development to its implementation inhabits two worlds. In the one, the formal bureaucratic structure is laid out in the official organizational chart and this is the basis for the way policy flows are meant to operate. Normally, policy flows down through a vertical chain of command with occasional lateral movements for coordination purposes. The other world is that of the network, which is driven by private, political and economic interests, and in which individuals and groups compete for power, status and material rewards. All state administrations inhabit these two worlds. What makes the Mexican case relevant for studying policy implementations is that here the checks on private interests are much weaker than in Finland or in England. We have suggested that both of these formal and informal worlds need to be taken into account and furthermore we need to understand the symbiotic relationship between the two: how officers require the formal structure to order their actions

Corporative Change in Mexico

109

and to lend them legitimacy, which in turn reciprocally breathes life into the formal structure. The way they do this is not necessarily in the interests of the majority of the population. It is the relationship between the modern state and social groups that most concerns Scott. The whole attraction of the ideal and rational state is that it aims to separate out private interests and public goods and these are independently regulated, and this is why it continues to inspire Mexican critics. It is, indeed, the model implicit in international consultants’ interventions. Scott questions these assumptions. His argument focuses on the mechanisms that a rational state employs to order its control of the public sphere, and he sees this as a dangerous precedent for the health of a society. His concerns lead him to doubt the aspiration towards a rational state, since he considers that this is too high a price to pay, principally because the modern state has been increasingly trespassing on areas of daily life, in its desire to homogenize and standardize what were once areas free from such intrusion, such as family life, parenting and certainly education. In the next chapter we give an account of a very different education system, that of England.

5

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

In this chapter we trace some of the developments and changes in the forms of educational governance in England over the last 25 years. This is not a complete history of educational reform over this period, since the volume of centrally directed experiments and interventions was such that it is difficult to document them all.1 However, we can characterize the period as a continuous process of change, flux and perturbation, in which successive governments experimented with, intervened in and changed the governance of the system. Changing the types of rewards and sanctions for teachers, the criteria for judging quality within the system, the compliance capacity of the workforce, and how they judged themselves and each other, contributed to changing the learning experiences of children. Ball (2010) argues that the processes of public sector transformation in the English education system had five key elements: de-concentration, disarticulation and diversification, flexibilization, destatization and centralization. The first of these, he suggests, was the ‘devolving of budgets and teacher employment to the school level’ (ibid.: 24). The second of these processes, that of disarticulation and diversification, refers to processes such as the weakening of the local government structure, the introduction of new types of schools with different governance and financing arrangements (e.g. city technology colleges,2 grant maintained schools,3 academies4 and free schools5), and diversification, so that, as Ball (ibid.) suggests, there is ‘a self-conscious attempt to promote new policy narratives, entrepreneurship and competitiveness in particular. Through these new narratives new values and modes of action are installed and legitimated and new forms of moral authority are established and others are diminished or derided’. The third of Ball’s processes of public sector transformation is flexibilization, where a plethora of approaches to teachers’ conditions of service were legiti­ mated, a new tier of teaching assistants was introduced into schools, and new

112

Interventions in Education Systems

and competing (with existing and well-established forms) systems for training teachers were introduced. The fourth process is destatization and destabili­ zation. Ball (ibid.: 26) explains this as, the ‘introduction of new providers by contracting-out of services, programmes and policy work, drastically blurring the already fuzzy divide between the public and private sectors’. The last of Ball’s processes of public sector transformation is, perhaps paradoxically, that of centralization. This was manifested in the retention of a national curriculum, albeit that large swathes of the sector were allowed to opt out, the central funding and governance of certain types of schools, and the creation with substantial powers of an inspection service to act as an enforcer of government policy, with this rapidly becoming known as a standards and quality agenda.

The professional status of the profession A significant change to the system occurred during this period with regard to the professional status of teachers,6 and this has implications for the types of power flows that operate within the system. Michel Foucault (1979: 79) has suggested that ‘(p)ower must be analyzed as something which circulates, or as something which only functions in the form of a chain’, and this can be applied to both professionalization and deprofessionalization processes. The teaching profession in the United Kingdom since 1988, when the Education Reform Act was passed, provides an example of an occupation which has experienced changing relations with the state, professional fragmentation and a reconceptualization of its ideological ethos. Before 1988 the occupational group had a degree of autonomy from the state, and this meant that it was able to shape its future direction. This referred to the particular ideal of service it subscribed to, the degree and extent to which it focused on common activities, the specific nature of the discourse community that was established, the distinctive epistemology of practice to which it worked, and the control it exercised over the development and maintenance of its specialized body of knowledge. If these five infrastructural elements are reformed in response to the needs of the state and through the policy cycle in which the state takes a dominant role, then this constitutes a diminution of control that the occupational group can exercise over its core business. Indeed, the decline of the professional authority of the teaching profession in England since 1988 has been extensively documented (e.g. Smyth 2001). This would suggest in turn that the teaching body in England should now be characterized as a state-regulated rather than a licensed occupation.

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

113

The second fundamental change to the teaching profession in England over the last 15 years has been the fragmentation of its professional remit. This is best exemplified by the way headteachers and teachers are increasingly being understood as different types of professionals, with different sets of competences, different relations with the state and quasi-governmental bodies, and indeed changing relations with each other. New headteachers are now required to have gained a national qualification, delivered and accredited by the National College for School Leadership and Learning,7 before they can be appointed. The net effect of these changes has been to managerialize the headteacher role. From a situation where the headteacher was understood as a leading teacher, the role has now changed to one of managing teacher performance or ‘productive autonomous performativity’ (Gunther and Ribbins 2002: 39). As a result different lists of competences have been developed for headteachers and teachers, with a consequent fragmentation of the profession and a distancing in professional terms of teachers from managers. Further to this, schools are now seen as cost centres in a quasi-market system, which compete for pupils and results with each other, and understand the direction of their accountability relations as being to governments, quasi-governmental bodies and parents, rather than to the profession as a whole. A third significant change to the professional mandate of teachers in England relates to the way pre-service and in-service training is now regulated both by governments and by universities, with the latter in turn granted a licence to deliver these courses by the state. At the pre-service level, university deliverers are required to conform to a code as to what they can teach and how they teach it, and this is formally inspected by the national inspection body, Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED),8 which has the power to withdraw that licence from providers.

Accountability and quality Fundamental to these changes has been a rescripting of the notions of quality and service, and consequently, new positions, roles and sets of moral ordinances for the workforce. Ball (1993: 216) suggests that in addition to new forms of managerialism that were introduced into schools during this period, there was a greater emphasis given to performativity. This is ‘a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgments, comparisons and displays

114

Interventions in Education Systems

as a means of incentive, control, attrition and change’ (ibid.). Performativity requires measurements of staff productivity and employs rewards and sanctions to guide staff performance to meet organizational goals. While profession­ alism and performativity may share the same goals, for example, improvements in performance, their cultures and discourses are fundamentally different. Sanguinetti (2000: 240) contrasts the discourses of teacher professionalism, which include ‘professional ethics, collegiality, social responsibility and good practice’ with the discourses of performativity, which include ‘value for money (efficiency), accountability (outcomes), international competitiveness and market discipline’. There is a variety of quality mechanisms, and they can be demarcated by their different structures and different causal narratives, notwithstanding that they are all designed to ensure that the system, institution or individual performance is as good as it could be and remains so. However, this raises a series of questions about such mechanisms: What constitutes the system, institution or individual performance? What constitutes efficiency, effectiveness or efficacy in relation to these? What is the best way for such organizations or persons to improve, and then sustain this improvement over a period of time? And what unplanned and unforeseen effects are there in the implementation of different models of quality assurance? These quality assurance mechanisms provide a measure of accountability. However, there is a need to distinguish between a system, institution or person giving a transparent account of their activities because this is intrinsically worthwhile, and that system, institution or person giving an account of their activities because this will trigger a mechanism which results in a more efficient, effective or productive state of affairs. It may be that less accountability in our first sense actually triggers a mechanism that leads to better performance of the system, institution or person, and counter-intuitively, more accountability in our first sense may lead to a decline in the performance of that body. The precise form that an accountability system takes is determined by policymakers answering five questions (Halstead 1994: 34): ‘Who is deemed to be accountable for a set of activities? To whom are they accountable? For what are they accountable? In what way are they accountable? And in what circumstances are they accountable?’ The history of education in England over the last 70 years shows how different answers to these questions are required when new arrangements and structures are put in place. The post-war consensus reflected a settlement between competing stakeholders in the construction and maintenance of the school curriculum. Schools in both the primary and

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

115

secondary sectors were not considered to be accountable to governments for the curriculum that they followed and thus were not required to justify curricular decisions they made to policymakers either for the contents of this curriculum or for the consequences of following it. (In reality, different forms of accountability operated, but these were to different people and were constructed in different ways.) In the post-war settlement schools were, however, relatively independent of governmental and parental pressures. The accountability form was of a professional kind, with schools organizing their activities on the basis of a presumed expertise in curriculum and pedagogy. (This still operates in the private sector, though market forces are holding these schools to account through a results-based mechanism.) When this post-war consensus broke down, the result was that a national curriculum was introduced (which over time has been extensively revised with more and more exemptions to it allowed), accountability relations between the different parts of the system changed, and a different type of account had to be given. Different accountability models in education have different knowledge bases. Central control models of accountability are underpinned by an output mechanism in which schools as a whole are judged in relation to past performance, or to standards achieved in other countries, or to some projected ideal about what they should be achieving. Consumer-dominated systems of accountability that focus on parental mechanisms of choice are reliant on aggregated judgements between schools, usually in the form of published league tables. Evaluative state models are predicated on a notion of accountability at the levels of process and outcome. Self-evaluative models of accountability are less concerned with cross-school comparisons and more concerned with those schools providing accounts of their practice which enable them to improve. This means that different accountability mechanisms are underpinned by different epistemic bases and as a result different types of judgement are made about those schools, systems and institutions. Indeed, the desire to substitute one system for another is driven by different epistemic commitments. Models that emphasize external forms of accountability and control are more likely to subscribe to epistemologies that emphasize determinacy, rationality, impersonality and prediction. Systems of accountability and control that emphasize local knowledges and devolved systems of power are more likely to be holistic and interpretative. Knowledge therefore always serves particular interests and consequently, accountability systems need to be understood as being interest-based (cf. Habermas 1971).

116

Interventions in Education Systems

We suggested in Chapter 2 that four models of accountability have been developed: a central control model (including an evaluative state model), a quasi-market model, a professional expert model and a partnership model. Professional development and partnership models have gradually been eroded within the English education system and been replaced by statist, evaluativestatist and quasi-market models of accountability. And this has had profound effects on the discursive spaces that teachers now inhabit. Giving an account of a series of activities is not a neutral activity, but changes the nature of that activity, and acts to transform our understandings of it and thus our response to it. An example of this is those mechanisms set up to monitor teaching and learning processes in educational institutions in England. There is a disjuncture between the actual processes of learning and those technologies, which are both intended to allow that learning to take place in a more efficient manner and monitor the effectiveness of that learning. The disjuncture occurs because these technologies contribute little to the process of learning; in effect, they are different activities with a different focus, though they purport to be about the same issue. Quality assurance mechanisms have as their purpose an intention or desire to change what is happening in a system, but this is because they act in an ideal sense so the teacher conforms in an imitative sense, or is compelled to conform or comply because of a fear of sanctions, or because those sanctions have been applied. What frequently results is a simulation where the teacher conforms on the surface to the demands of the quality assurance process, but in fact operates through a different set of logics. Whether they do this successfully is a different matter because they have to be highly skilled in playing both games simultaneously; in effect operating discursively along parallel tracks and making sure that the one doesn’t contaminate the other. Their sense of direction, however, is always primarily directed towards putting in place the optimal conditions for learning of their students. Though the purpose of bureaucratization is to act as a form of labour control, this term fails to give expression to the full import of the process, because the colonizing process achieves its purpose through changing the epistemology of the setting. This entails a displacement of content through operating a standardized bureau­cratic form of knowledge. This is an example of a quality mechanism in operation. These mechanisms have different characteristics and dimensions, and they can be understood as positions on a number of scales: the degree to which they engender a low or high level of trust within the system; the degree of punitive strength they can muster; their capacity to influence the activities under scrutiny, for example,

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

117

whether they can or cannot initiate washback effects; their capacity to influence the epistemological character of the setting; the degree of affordance they give to participants in the setting; and their underpinning ideological framework regarding human nature and possible forms of human interaction. Most quality mechanisms ask for explicit rather than tacit accounts of practice, and this is not just a question of showing or demonstrating, but of the practitioner stating them in a formal codified way (and in a particular form which means that they have particular consequences): It is also knowledge, so the dreamers dream, that has one other important characteristic, relevant to education; it need not be learnt by apprenticeship to a master but can be learnt in a form of training that is open to mechanisation. Expen­sive, holistically fashioned, professional practice is thus replaceable, ex hypothesi, by cheaper, atomised, lower-order activity. (Arnal and Burwood 2003: 379)

Here there is direct engagement with the constitutive practices. However, the nature of the practice may be distorted by the desire to make it explicit; in other words, there may be a problem of reductionism, especially if the means of expression that is used is quantitative.

Revaluations and devaluations A third change to the English education system over the last 25 years was achieved through devaluations and revaluations of the currency of education for schools, teachers and students. And this happened because successive governments drove through an assessment-led reform process, with consequent knock-on effects on curriculum, governance, notions of quality, learning and accountability. In the context of the introduction of the national curriculum in England, it is possible to identify a number of seminal phases or interventions by governments or government bodies with regard to assessment and evaluation, that is, the means, criteria and apparatus by which teachers, schools and students are judged. The first of these found its most direct expression in the Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT) Report commissioned by the government in 1988, which argued that the fundamental building blocks of any national assessment system should be regular cycles of teacher assessments and that these  should

118

Interventions in Education Systems

be fully integrated with teaching and learning programmes. Proposing a tenlevel system to encourage progression with the average pupil expected to change levels every 2 years, it adopted a criterion-referenced framework so that children’s achievements were assessed against written criteria. The report was fundamentally opposed to assessments that were separate from and not connected to curricula, and yet argued for results to be published at the end of each key stage, albeit without being adjusted for the socio-economic background of individuals and schools. At the second phase a number of significant changes to these original recommendations were made. These downgraded the importance of teacher assessments on the grounds that teachers could not be trusted to mark their students fairly because they had a vested interest in them doing well, and this low trust phenomenon was to become a defining characteristic of the reforms and system interventions. Henceforth, the connection between these forms of assessment conducted at the end of the four key stages and the teaching and learning programme was weakened. Formal assessments conducted at the end of each key stage became the norm. Teacher assessments would cover those attainment targets which could not be covered by Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs), and, more significantly, were designated as the mechanism for deciding at which level of the SAT pupils would be entered. The third phase, which coincided with the appointment of a new Secretary of State, was in effect a continuation of the trend established in phase two. Instead of SATs, which were long, interactive, curriculum-focused and had formative potential, the development agencies were instructed to deliver ‘paper and pencil’, summative, easily managed and simpler-to-process end of key stage tests. At the same time, coursework components in the national system of examination, known as the General Certificate of Secondary Education (at key stage four), were to be statutorily reduced, and publication of test scores, unrefined by value-added processes, was endorsed by the Education Act. The fourth phase culminated in the Dearing Review, which recommended separating out formative and summative forms of assessment, repositioned on an equal basis teacher assessments and SATs, suggested replacing the ten-level system with four separate reporting stages, and proposed a slimming down of the curriculum as well as these assessment arrangements. The fifth phase was a period of consolidation and refinement, though much of the work done by governments during this period entailed trimming, adapting and compromising at the level of detail. The building blocks of the assessment-driven reform processes were already in place and were not significantly amended.

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

119

Phase one: Mixed messages The first phase then focused on the publication of TGAT Report in 1988 (DES 1988a), followed by three supplements (DES 1988b) a few months later. TGAT (DES 1988a: 23) argued that a fully integrated system of assessment can and should be formative and summative: Promoting children’s learning is the principal aim of school. Assessment lies at the heart of this process. It can provide a framework in which educational objectives may be set and pupils’ progress charted and expressed. It can yield a basis for planning the next educational steps in response to children’s needs. By facilitating dialogue between teachers, it can enhance professional skills and help the school as a whole to strengthen learning across the curriculum and throughout its age range.

Later changes to the assessment arrangements have focused on unpicking this apparent conflation within the same system of these two purposes (either by downgrading the one at the expense of the other, such as in phase three; or clearly separating the different purposes, as Dearing (1993) suggested, in phase four). Formative modes of assessment are most closely associated with the process of teaching itself, but it is the results of these summative tests which are most visible and public. Formative dimensions of assessment focus on providing information for the teacher about the way students complete particular tasks. The information provided is intended to feed directly into the teaching process, so the focus is on how students tackle these tasks and how they go about solving problems that they are given. The assessment environment does not need to be standardized during formative processes of assessment. Formative assessment allows the teacher to collect information about how to move the learner forward and thus make plans for the next stage of learning. Summative assessment is concerned with determining whether students have mastered particular elements of the curriculum. Summative assessments aim to be reliable and valid; and homogeneity of context is considered to be important so that comparability becomes possible. A summative assessment marks some point in the otherwise potentially organic teaching and learning process at which it is decided to stop teaching and give one’s full attention to assessment. The stage at which it is most important to carry out this kind of assessment is often determined by factors other than those arising from learning goals, such as predetermined times in the school year, or a requirement to report to other interested parties.

120

Interventions in Education Systems

TGAT (DES 1988a: 97) further argued that assessments should be connected with and not separated from curricula: The assessment system being proposed differs from most of the standardised testing that is now used in many primary schools and some secondary schools. Those tests are not related closely to what children are being taught, and when they identify children likely to have difficulties they give little indication of the nature of problems. Their purpose is to compare children with each other and with samples of children with whom the tests were originally developed, often many years ago.

Assessments may be more or less integrated with the teaching programmes that students follow. Some kinds of assessment are not actually designed to mea­ sure the pupil’s learning (or the results of the teacher’s teaching), in which case they are often associated with measures of qualities supposedly inherent in the student, such as ‘intelligence’. Assessment which is placed at the integrated end of the continuum is likely to be more informal than formal, more formative than summative, process- as well as product-orientated; and to be frequent or continuous rather than taking place on one predetermined occasion at the end of the programme. TGAT (ibid.) advocated a criterion-referenced system of assessment: In which an award or grade is made on the basis of the quality of the perfor­ mance of the pupil, irrespective of the performance of other pupils . . . [so] that teachers and pupils [can] be given clear descriptions of the performances being sought.

Though norm-referenced systems of assessment have become less popular, criterion-referenced systems are not without their problems. First, systems with a simple pass–fail result such as a driving test are much easier to operate than complex multi-level systems such as a national curriculum. Criteria are relatively easy to identify for use in testing a performance like driving proficiency, but harder to associate precisely with a range of levels of learning as in a national curriculum. Second, criterion-referenced systems conflate logical hierarchies of skill and content with developmental approaches to the learning of students. In addition, establishing criteria appropriate to the various levels involves some notion of an average student. The fourth element of the assessment scheme proposed by TGAT was the reporting arrangements. The task force recommended that there should be no requirement of a school or a local education authority to publish information about the results of the assessment made at key stage one. At other stages, TGAT (DES 1988a: 99) suggested that unrefined data should be published:

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

121

Only if this is done in the context of reports about that school as a whole, so that it can be fair to that school’s work and take account so far as possible of socioeconomic and other influences.

The arguments against this approach and in favour of value-addedness have been well-rehearsed. However, it quickly became policy to publish such infor­ mation in league or alphabetically arranged tables without reference to the school’s socio-economic profile in the form of any general statement. TGAT thus combined different functions of assessment, incorporated different models of school improvement and supported conflicting notions of accountability. Two models of assessment can be identified. The first of these argues that information that is gathered during assessment processes should be used by teachers and students to plan future learning experiences. Assessment as part of school improvement is perceived of as contextualized; the timing of the assessments, their relationships to the specifics of the course and the conditions under which they were undertaken are all taken into consideration as teachers, parents and children interpret the results; as ipsative where the assessments refer only to the teaching and learning profiles of those students and their past achievements, and comparisons with other students and schools cannot be drawn from them; and as non-competitive where this emphasizes a professional commitment to high standards of teaching rather than a competitive incentive to outperform other students, teachers or schools. More importantly, this model places a low emphasis on external accountability, whether in the context of free-market consumerism or state control systems of accountability. Accountability may be directly to the students, but in the context of professional integrity rather than in response to external pressures. The alternative model characterizes assessment as decontextualized; here, a high emphasis is placed on comparability, so that variables particular to specific students, teaching situations or schools, are not given the same priority as they are in the first model; and as competitive where a teacher’s work is judged in relation to the achievements of his or her peers. This model also strongly emphasizes external accountability. Indeed in line with a free-market consumerist model of accountability, failure in the context of the public market-place leads to loss of income for the school and of employment for teachers. Aspects of both models featured in the initial TGAT Report, though subsequent arrangements made for assessment are more in line with our second model. It was hardly surprising that the TGAT Report was read differently by different people. Some pointed to progressive features; others identified more regressive features.

122

Interventions in Education Systems

Phase two: Adjustments by the central authority TGAT had made a number of recommendations about the role and importance of teacher assessments. The chief purpose of the SATs was to ensure reliability and comparability, and furthermore it was suggested that these should work at the class and not the individual level. If they diverged, the teacher assessment was adjusted. The School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC 1989a: 68, 1989b) proposed in response to the TGAT Report the following: First, teachers would assess pupils on every attainment target. . . . Subject scores would be aggregated and passed onto local moderators in the spring. Second, teachers would administer SATs in the summer to all pupils ‘but possibly only for some attainment targets’. Where available, the SAT result would displace the teacher assessment.

SEAC (1989a: 68–9) went further at the end of the year in making the following recommendations to the Secretary of State:

1. By the end of the spring term preceding the end of the key stage there should be a recorded teacher assessment giving the level each pupil had reached in each attainment target. 2. When the SATs have been used in the summer term there will also be a recorded SAT outcome for some attainment targets – probably not all. 3. Where (1) and (2) yield the same outcome for each profile component, that is the end of the matter. The SAT outcome for the attainment, where there is one, should stand. 4. Where (1) and (2) yield a different outcome for any profile component, the SAT outcome may be used for the pupil record if the teacher is content. If the teacher believes (1) should be used, the teacher will be required to make a case for this choice through local moderating arrangements, details of which still await clarification. These proposals formed part of the final standing orders published in July 1990. They also included complicated rules for aggregating attainment target achievements, and aggregating profile achievements into subject achievements. The new orders signalled a radical change of direction. Henceforth, assessment, moderation and reporting would operate at individual attainment target level, and more importantly, SATs were to be the main method of assessment, with teacher assessments being marginalized. Assessment arrangements in this phase were in a state of transition with no clear  ideological line as yet forthcoming. Without recourse to legislation,

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

123

significant amendments were being made on a number of fronts. First, the text was being rewritten with the result that teachers would experience significant amounts of disempowerment. It was becoming more readerly and less writerly (Barthes 1975). Second, the amended text was being repositioned in the system so that relations between the different parts were being reordered. What was also beginning to emerge was a desire by the central authority to reinforce and augment public or state control modes of accountability. In phase three the trend became clearer.

Phase three: Reassertion of control In 1990 a new secretary of state, Kenneth Clarke, took over. He was determined to reassert the power of the central authority over its constituent bodies. He wanted to limit and circumscribe the power of the individual teacher, ‘the professional expert’, by reordering relations between the different parts of the system. He inherited a number of problems: the first SATs appeared to be too long, too detailed and difficult to manage. They also demanded considerable input by teachers with the result that doubts began to be expressed about their reliability and comparability. Furthermore, it was suggested that standards were being eroded in the GCSE, as the number of candidates obtaining high grades increased year on year. The Secretary of State acted in two ways. First, a number of key stage three SAT development contracts were terminated, and new specifications set. These asked the Mathematics Development Agency, for example, to produce at key stage three, three one-hour tests covering all the content attainment targets. Process attainment tasks were to be assessed by non-statutory SATs, and there was a general revision and culling of attainment targets. Brown (1992: 17), writing about these new orders, noted: The irony of this decision to revert to short written tests is that they are purported to be in the interests of teachers who, it was assumed, – before waiting for evidence to the contrary to become available – would find the KS3 SATs unmanageable and disruptive.

The effect of this type of testing was problematic: it limited the ability of the assessments to allow formative and diagnostic judgements to be made; it further separated assessment from curricula by restricting and standardizing the way these assessments were made, and it downgraded the importance of teacher assessments.

124

Interventions in Education Systems

A similar move occurred with coursework arrangements in the GCSE, the political rhetoric emphasizing reliability, comparability and the maintenance of standards. The Secretary of State argued: Coursework should play an important part in its curriculum, but not all of it good. SEAC and HMI have constantly identified cases in which there is too much variation in the tasks set, too much diversity in marking and moderation, and too much opportunity for cheating. It may not give a true and honest indication of a pupil’s ability. (Clarke 1990: 2)

From 1994, the maximum amount of coursework allowed was: English 40 per cent, Mathematics 20 per cent, Science 30 per cent, Technology 60 per cent, History 25 per cent, Geography 25 per cent, Social Science 20 per cent, Business Studies 25 per cent and Economics 20 per cent. Twenty years later, coursework is now even more restricted in most subjects, including those that have practical elements. Phase three then represents the clearest expression of what has been called a standards and accountability model. In particular this phase saw considerable emphasis being placed on the publishing of league and alphabetically arranged tables of performance, with the unit of currency unadjusted. This and other aspects of the testing arrangements would lead to a boycott by the teacher unions, with few schools completing the key stage three statutory tests in the summer of 1993 and a significant number of primary and infant schools abandoning key stage one assessments half way through. The ability of the central authority to impose its agenda on schools was being challenged. The response by government was to commission the Dearing Review (1993), culminating in the Dearing Report (1994). The Review was asked to provide answers to four questions:

1. What is the scope for slimming down the curriculum itself? 2. What is the future for the ten-level scale for graduating children’s attainments? 3. How can the testing arrangements be simplified? 4. How can the central administration of the National Curriculum and testing arrangements be improved? (Dearing 1993: 65–6)

Phase four: Compromise The Dearing Report (1994) sought to bridge the divide between the competing parties. Lord Dearing proposed a number of significant amendments. First, though he accepted the need to separate teacher assessments from national test

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

125

results by recommending that they ‘should be shown separately in all forms of reporting and in school prospectuses’ (1994: 52), he also argued for those teacher assessments to be moderated in terms of statutory end of key stage tests. Depending on the means used, this could have resulted in two sets of results being reported side-by-side, with similarities and differences between them open for discussion. What Dearing was trying to do here was separate out formative and diagnostic purposes of assessment from summative and evaluative ones. This also had the effect of reasserting the importance of teacher assessments, although his recommendation was that they should be moderated externally by SATs. Dearing further proposed that the prescribed curricular arrangements as they had been expressed in the published orders should be cut back. The time released would allow the teaching of non-statutory material, the teaching of programmes of study which would go beyond those laid down in the new orders; the teaching of subjects not included in the national curriculum; and the reinforcing of mastery of basic skills. Though the time left would still be small in relation to the time spent on the prescribed curriculum, this would significantly affect the ability of teachers to contribute to curriculum-making and thus to be responsive to the needs of their pupils. The third suggestion that Dearing made was that the ten-level system should be replaced by four separate age-related systems. The intention was clear: to simplify and clarify, and thus to make workable these assessment arrangements. He argued that the ten-level system had three problematic aspects: subject knowledge and skills are not necessarily best expressed in a linear form; pupils do not necessarily learn best in simple orderly and linear ways; and ‘it is difficult to devise clear, unambiguous, hierarchical criteria except for simple or clearly defined tasks’ (Dearing 1994: 40). Finally he argued for a need to collect and publish summative data about pupils and schools. He was sympathetic about the need to rework the unrefined data to allow for socio-economic factors to be taken account of, and he rejected the arguments for carefully devised light sampling to allow judgements to be made of the system year by year. So while separating out formative and summative forms of assessment, he in fact aligned closely together these functions and thus placed this alignment within a standards and accountability model. This is further evidence of the tensions between two conflicting models of accountability. The first of these emphasizes professional control over curricula, though teachers would be expected to respond to the demands of external review. The second is a variant on the consumerist model, in which

126

Interventions in Education Systems

market mechanisms predominate and data are gathered to compare schools with each other. If those data reflect badly on particular schools, then the market extracts a penalty and the school loses pupils and teachers and may even have to close down.

Consolidation The Dearing Reforms effectively set in place the form that national curriculum assessments would take for the next 12 years. The early part of the new Labour Government’s 12-year period in office saw the development of national literacy and numeracy strategies at primary school level. They were perceived to be successful, though later analyses suggested that exaggerated claims had been made about them, especially at key stage three (cf. Coe and Tymms 2008). However, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the publication mechanism was becoming of greater significance, as ministers embraced the target culture and as the OFSTED inspection process began to use such data to make judgements about schools which had real effects on the survival of those schools. These judgements were comparative in two senses: against a benchmark so that expected proportions of children achieving a certain level became established within the system; and the translation of these (with other observational data collected) to categorize schools into bands deemed successful or failing, with severe consequences for those schools which didn’t reach acceptable standards. This change of tactics took a further sudden step in October 2008, when (yet another) Secretary of State for Education, Ed. Balls, unexpectedly an­nounced the cessation of National Curriculum testing at key stage three, with immediate effect. This included both the existing key stage tests and the single level tests, which would continue to be piloted for key stage two only. In making this announcement, the Secretary of State set out the government’s view of three key principles for the continuation of the assessment system. He said it should, first, give parents the information they need to compare different schools, choose the right school for their child and then track their child’s progress; second, enable headteachers and teachers to secure the progress of every child and their school as a whole, without unnecessary burdens or bureaucracy; and third, allow the public to hold national and local government and governing bodies to account for the performance of schools. In the light of these principles, he

Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System

127

stated that he had concluded that the key stage three testing was not justified. Parents could obtain information from GCSE results, and a new system of ‘realtime reporting of progress’ would be developed for tracking individual pupils. In addition, there would also be an externally marked test with a sample of pupils to measure national performance, holding the government to account. The most significant of all the changes initiated by successive governments in England are these assessment reforms; their penetrative power is such that the various systems of curriculum, pedagogy, learning, teaching and school governance have all been profoundly affected by them. In this chapter we have traced some of the developments and changes in the forms of educational governance in England over the last 25 years. This is not a complete history of educational reform over this period, but we have focused on the most important and long-lasting system-changes that have been made. This has been a period of unprecedented change, in which successive governments experimented with, intervened in, and altered the arrangements for, the governance of the system. Changing the types of rewards and sanctions for teachers, the criteria for judging quality within the system, the compliance capacity of the workforce, and how teachers judged themselves and each other, contributed to changing the learning experiences of children. We address these issues of reform and systems-change in the next chapter as we move to examine another education system, that of Singapore.

6

Statism and the Singapore Model

Singapore features regularly in the news as an example of a high-performing education system as measured in international tests (OECD 2014). Its education system has been the centre of attention for national policymakers, educationalists and social scientists wishing to understand and emulate its achievements, and international organizations like the OECD anxious to promote a close relationship between economic development and educational institutions and practices (cf. Barber and Mourshed 2009; Goh 2007; OECD 2000, 2001, 2005, 2009a). Like much of the superficial perceptions of occidental visitors to the Far East continued awe is based upon a set of myths that may cloud their understanding. The small recently formed island state of Singapore, with a tightly packed resident population of about 4 million, overwhelmingly of Chinese origin, has captured the imagination of international organizations like the World Bank and the OECD as a stable and reliable provider of services to international capital through the agency of a single-minded party (the People’s Action Party (PAP)1). The PAP has monopolized and shaped Singapore’s social and political landscape since its independence from the United Kingdom in 1963. Explanations for this range from the view that Singapore is an example of authoritarian capitalism to the official view that, in the words of its veritable founder Lee Kuan Yew, it represents the successful marriage of Western democracy to traditional Asian values. There is, however, agreement that the Singaporean state, closely entwined with the PAP, has been able to achieve the social compliance and stability required to convince other nations that it is a successful place to invest in and trade with. Since its separation from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, and being an entity with no real agricultural hinterland, a very small industrial sector and reliance to such an extent on servicing that over 80 per cent of its active population work in such industries, Singapore has benefited greatly

130

Interventions in Education Systems

from strong and continuous government and one party rule to produce the infrastructure and train the workforce necessary to secure such a position of esteem. In part this has been achieved through the efforts of well over 1.49 million heavily restricted and supervised migrant labourers, who constitute one third of the work force, and whose visas exclude basic labour and familial rights. What attracts the interest if not captures the imagination of educationalists is that its principal instrument to effect such a change has been the creation of a system of education that is a catalyst to economic development and at the same time promotes social solidarity and conformity to government institutions. From the 1960s the governing party became convinced that it could never develop an economy of scale sufficient to compete with other well-established and neighbouring economies. The island, in their view, could become an important adjunct and supplier to China and other Asian economies, serve as an auxiliary to multinational corporations and act as a bridge between the growing Asian economies and other developing and developed countries. To achieve these aims it was necessary to create from unpromising beginnings an educational system capable of providing vocational and flexible skills necessary to service international organizations and, above all, to supply and service the international financial sector. Hence, education was placed at the top of the policy agenda. Some commentators maintain that there is a curious instability in the systems of education which it has established. That is, the type of human resources Singapore must develop requires an emphasis on inventiveness and creativity. However, inventiveness and creativity within the labour market run the risk of spilling over into thinking inventively about how the society is ordered. Hence, the government has sought to differentiate in the public mind the types of thinking necessary to provide adequately trained personnel for the service industries that it wishes to promote and subversive and critical thoughts about the sociopolitical arrangements made by governments. The Singaporean education revolution is strongly circumscribed by the need to maintain social order within its borders, which in the eyes of the party-state is a sine qua non. Without that stability, the fear is that the markets, which provide it with the means to secure its economic prosperity, could dissipate and be lost forever to other countries such as China. In that sense Singapore is almost an ideal example of the tension between the development of the type of vocational education required to produce en

Statism and the Singapore Model

131

masse middle-range administrators and the need to inculcate and maintain a central value system. These two forces oscillate in their importance; however, if the maintenance of the central value system is challenged or threatened in any fundamental way, then order and conformity always takes precedence. We will demonstrate this in our analysis of the construction of new educational institutions and practices in Singapore. In reality in this small island state, various types of hybrid arrangements prevailed. For example, old and new elements operate along parallel tracks and thus the workings of the one do not interfere in the workings of the other. Or, though in tension, they work against each other to produce new arrangements, albeit that there are also some unexpected outcomes. Even then, writing a chronology of the history of educational ideas, institu­ tions and practices in Singapore is no simple matter. The institutions devised by the party, the trade unions and the state to exercise and enforce social control act to circumscribe what can be researched and published. It is extraordinarily difficult to locate an unofficial narrative about what has occurred, why it has occurred and how it has occurred. Research institutions are directly accountable to the government, which is assiduous in sanctioning only those projects, schemes, programmes of work and enterprises that it favours. Singapore is an extraordinarily sensitive society, which has all but banned strikes and is quick to apply its very strict Public Order Act to all forms of dissent, and in particular forms of public protest. This means that, aside from occasional opinion pieces usually produced by ex-teachers outside the country, the historical narratives that have been produced are invariably official ones. The history of Singapore’s education system has been characterized as consisting of three phases: a survival-driven phase lasting from independence to about 1978; an efficiency-driven phase which lasted until 1996 and which culminated in government reforms known as Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN), which was also the title of a presentation given by the prime minister, Goh Chock Tong (1997); and finally from then to now an ability-driven phase. These phases of educational reform are now part of the historical narrative accepted by historians and chroniclers in Singapore and each of them was followed by a series of government reforms. Our understanding of what happened is therefore based on an official account of the history of change; implicit within it is that educational practices change as a result of changes in resource allocations, arrangements of people, discursive and institutional structures, and the articulation of concerns, problems and difficulties that emanate from the state.

132

Interventions in Education Systems

The survival phase (1965–78) What is etched in the collective memory of the island state is the economic and social chaos that occurred after the expulsion of the Japanese in 1945 and the return of the British colonial authorities, whose main concern was to divest themselves of their East of Suez colonies. Singapore’s economy at this time was entirely dependent on the British, whose practice of divide and rule sharply divided the ethnic groupings in the island, split an active trade union movement and as a result overcame a strong communist insurgency, which was allied to groups on the mainland. Ambivalence about a continued link to Malaysia and a sense of isolation within the 75 per cent of the population that was Chinese in origin exacerbated the situation. In the first instance what was required was an exceptional effort to develop a binding mechanical solidarity of the most unadulterated Durkheimian kind (Durkheim [1895] 2005) to build a strong economy with solid foundations. In the second instance new institutions and institutional practices were required that could mould the surviving colonial system into a force that could construct and then maintain a Singaporean identity. The principal institutions that had survived independence: the legal system, based on the British model, and the education system, hitherto based upon selecting a small élite group to occupy middle management positions in government organizations while providing little education for the mass of the population, had to be infused with what we might want to call a vocationally based sense of identity. For a long time after independence from Britain and separation from Malaysia, Singapore’s economy continued to be depressed and was unable to provide work for a rapidly growing population. The Japanese occupation (1942–5), followed by the reoccupation of an enfeebled British government, had reduced economic activity to servicing a military outpost and small-scale trading and manufacturing. Singapore remained primarily an entrepot with over 70 per cent of its GDP based on such activities and over 25 per cent on servicing British interests. After its expulsion from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, Singapore’s economy became even more fragile with the loss of markets in Malaysia and a work force under-occupied and poorly trained. Moreover, Singapore was heavily dependent on imported goods. The government, on the advice of the Argentinian economist, Raúl Prebisch (1950), developed a strategy known as Import Substitution Industrialisation,2 which was designed to reduce dependency on imported goods, replace these with domestic products, and transform the manufacturing sector to one that produced high value goods.

Statism and the Singapore Model

133

In essence this meant that Singapore had, in the first instance, to find a way to substitute home-grown, small-scale goods for these imported goods, and also train a more highly skilled and specialized workforce capable of producing them, as well as providing the wherewithal to develop an export-led strategy and promote more technologically based industry. Hence, from that time an export-led strategy became the new orthodoxy in Singapore. It became clear to the government advised by a bevy of international organizations like the World Bank that the principal impediments to launching an export-led economic strategy were the lack of an effective skill-base, the undeveloped nature of the country’s human resources and the need to move away from small-scale production based on an unskilled and unsophisticated labour force character­ istic of countries without previous industrial experience. To this end, the government launched a two-pronged offensive. The first part of the strategy consisted in re-organizing the trade union movement into a single organization under strict government control. The second part consisted in putting their efforts into producing a literate and technically trained workforce focusing on upskilling labour, with this being understood in instrumentalist and economic terms. Under British control, education was seen as a means for suppressing and controlling nationalism, while at the same time developing a workforce whose skills were adequate for Singapore to operate efficiently as an entrepot. Since the overriding concern at this time was how a relatively poor island shorn of the markets of its natural hinterland could survive, economic expansion was seen as an essential part of the creation of a nation state. However, this was not possible until a viable nation state came into existence. During the survival phase, the quest for a form of national identity was paramount given the need to unite the Chinese, the vast majority of the island’s population, the Malay, who closely identified with Malaya, and the Indian ethnic groups, into Singaporeans. If the conflicts between these groups were to be overcome and the economy was to be developed, the construction of an independent, unified national state was a priority. This translated, in educational terms, into equal treatment for the four streams of education (i.e. Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English); the de jure establishment of Malay as the national language of the new state, though fairly rapidly English became the de facto or principal language in which government, administration, schooling and above all commerce was conducted; and the placing of a greater emphasis on mathematics, science and technical subjects. All of this required a highly centralized and efficient system of coordination and control with immense powers being given to those at its apex. The rapid

134

Interventions in Education Systems

development of a national system of education to meet these needs could only be achieved by a strong and, at times, highly intrusive state. Hence, the education system emerged from the institutions set up by the state. The initial purpose was to provide as quickly as possible a system of compulsory elementary education for all regardless of race, language, sex, wealth or status (and the dearth of private education providers persists to this day). Bilingualism became both the norm and an essential part of the system, and the learning of English alongside one or other of the ethnic languages fitted the desire of the government to be able to compete in world economic markets.

The efficiency phase (1979–96) By 1978 the limitations and inherent contradictions of the Import Substitution Industrialisation strategy became apparent as there were few signs of progressing from the assembling of consumer goods to the actual production of capital goods. Hence, the second phase between 1979 and 1996 has been described as efficiency driven. The focus at government level shifted from a labour-intensive economy to a capital and skills-intensive economy based on upgrading to highly skilled technology-based industries. This was a shift hallmarked by the policy of Export Oriented Industrialisation (EOI)3 (cf. Karunaratne 1980), and it entailed the introduction of new structures, new forms of educational governance, and new resource and accountability arrangements. The ease with which these changes were made to the system reflects a particular type of power structure in operation, a top-down, government-driven, autocratic arrangement, with few possibilities for resistance. It also points to a particular focus on material structures of incentives and rewards, with less of an emphasis on ideological structures, so that the process of developing a standardized national belief system was seen as less important. In January 1979 Singapore moved from a system that was designed to create a sense of national identity, integrating the various ethnicities and constructing an independent unified national state to a system of schooling that was designed to produce a capital-rich and technically skilled work-force. The Government at the time was moving the economy from an import-led and entrepot economy to an export-led technologically driven and competitive economy. This phase focused on reducing the variation in performance across schools and it heralded the introduction of students being streamed into different tracks, with little

Statism and the Singapore Model

135

movement between them from an early age. For example, at the level of high school, multiple pathways included: academic high schools, which prepared students for college; polytechnic high schools that focused on advanced occupational and technical training and that could also lead to college; and technical institutes that focused on occupational and technical training for a fifth of the students. To some extent this mirrored the grammar school/technical school/secondary modern divide that the United Kingdom had been and was still in the process of dismantling. That the United Kingdom has now begun to move back towards an elite system of public education, albeit by invoking mantras of choice and diversity, is a different story. At the same time Singapore created a Curriculum Development Institute4 in order to supply to schools and teachers sets of curriculum materials. These curriculum materials which dovetailed at this time with a national set of curriculum standards and a national assessment system ensured some measure of standardization of curriculum, of assessment and more fundamentally of pedagogy within the public school system in Singapore. Each classroom and each teacher at this time received the same type of materials and the same resources for each grade. This standardization was in part driven and also validated by success in international league tables such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the PISA. By 1995, Singapore’s school system was among the top-performing systems in the world, topping TIMSS rankings in both Mathematics and Science that year. Between 1985 and 1991 a series of legislative changes to the system were made. At the end of the primary school phase all pupils were placed in streamed classes that were commensurate with their learning pace, capability and disposition to learn. In addition, gifted and talented education programmes5 were introduced in 1995. English became the principal medium of instruction, this practice being driven by globalization pressures. Changes were also made to teacher supply and training, with the imperative being to attract teachers of a high quality, though high quality was not defined as pedagogical expertise but as academic (in the narrow range of subjects studied at university level) expertise. Teacher training courses were reformed to ensure a supply of highquality teachers into the profession. In 1992 the Vocational and Industrial Training Board (VITB) was reconstituted as the Institute of Technical Edu­ cation (ITE) and its operation and mission were redefined. These new postsecondary institutes of education were populated by students who had not achieved very much at primary school, and had subsequently been channelled

136

Interventions in Education Systems

into the new Normal Technical Secondary stream of schooling. The vocational and academic streams were being clearly differentiated from an early age, and in addition, curriculum and pedagogic programmes were devised which were thought more appropriate for these types of children. Evidence from other countries round the world suggests that separate and segregated systems of vocational and academic education also have attached to them attributions of low and high status (cf. Young 2007). Singapore sought to dispel this by injecting large amounts of resource into the vocational schools and developing well-paid apprenticeship schemes.

The ability-driven phase (1996–2010) As we have suggested in Chapter 1, in protectionist policy regimes educational policy development is centralized because the nation state seeks to bind together diverse segments of the population by developing national curriculum, administrative and in some cases, pedagogic arrangements and agendas. Nevertheless, the very cultural and social-class distinctions that pervade the society require some diversification of provision consistent with the neo-liberalism prevalent in many previously protectionist economies, and these were more obviously present at the third stage of educational reform in Singapore. This effervescence points up the tension between the centre and periphery, resolved in Singapore by the introduction of devolved policies of management, governance and accountability. Depending on the degree of decentralization of the public educational administration to the regions, the same type of friction may still exist between these levels and within the public sector. And depending on the degree of centralization in this type of regime, teachers are likely to be subject to state professionalization interventions as is typical in a corporatist regime. The third and final phase then has come to be known as the ability-driven phase and this suggests a paradigm-shift in thinking about education. In 1997, the Singaporean government launched TSLN (Goh 1997), marking the start of its ability phase and emphasizing a shift in focus, so that the emphasis was now on each student reaching his or her potential. This meritocratic initiative was in a sense a reaffirmation of some of the policies and practices in the education system that preceded it, such as the development of gifted and talented programmes of learning, the introduction of streaming from a

Statism and the Singapore Model

137

young age and the clear separation of vocational streams from academic ones. However, what marked it out as a distinct educational phase was the degree of autonomy now given to teachers and schools. The logic engendered by the focus on the ability of the student was that schools and teachers should be given more flexibility and responsibility in how they could teach and manage their classrooms. School clusters were introduced to create forums for school leadership development and this allowed the sharing of good practice in teaching and learning. The thinking behind this initiative is somewhat paradoxical as its central tenet was to move away from (for the sake of efficiency) a centralized command position in the system and allow the possibility of failure. The centralized, standardized, top-down system, the emphasis on examination success and consequently rote-learning, the practice of tracking and the passivity of students in the learning process, all of which were seen as pivotal in the development of the nation and its economic success, were now seen as impediments in a post-industrial and globalized scenario. This has involved a shift from an efficiency-driven system to an ability-driven system; however, it also points to continuities between the reforms in the shape of streaming and setting. Brown and Lauder (2006) have suggested that the break in the policies of Singapore reflects two distinct scenarios: a neo-fordist model and postfordist model.6 In the first case, we have an emphasis on policies and practices whose purpose was to increase productivity, privatize national services and monopolies, reduce the power of organized labour, cut and reform welfare provision, make labour markets more efficient by increasing competition, and provide flexibility; all of this based on the view that the market was a more efficient allocator of resources than the state. This can be compared with a post-fordist policy which emphasizes the state’s direct sponsorship of high skills, its retention of workforces, the longterm investment in human capital and in the infrastructure which supports them, and even the promotion of new forms of service and industry. Both of these scenarios attach a high value to education, though they understand their commitment to it in very different ways. The neo-fordist model is constituted by a belief in applying the principles of the market to the education system, the promotion of a standards and accountability agenda, and the advancement of choice and entrepreneurship policies. Key policies that fit this model are voucher systems, measures of parental choice, a variety of schools and setting up competitive systems to reward success, such as league tables of

138

Interventions in Education Systems

performance. The post-fordist model focuses on human capacity, development and performance, encouraging creativity, innovation and working together. This destatization process, where power and influence moves from elected representatives to an array of other actors, is characteristic of this third, and perhaps post-fordist, phase in the history of educational reform in Singapore. Clusters of schools were created with former headteachers heading up these clusters. The old top-down inspection system was replaced by a model of excellence and self-evaluation. No single accountability model was prescribed for all schools. Each school was now allowed to set its own goals and objectives and annually assess its own performance against nine preset functional areas (five enablers and four sets of academic results). Every 6 years there would be an external inspection by the School Appraisal Branch of the Ministry of Education. Streaming which, as we have noted, was an essential feature of the Singapore education system was replaced with subject-based banding. This had a similar pedagogical effect, but allowed more flexibility than the previous system and avoided some of the problems associated with being labelled as a bottom-stream or top-stream child, even though the degree to which individual children varied across subject-based bands was limited. At the end of the primary school, children were required to sit a primary school leaving examination in English, Mathematics, a mother-tongue Language and Science. As a result of these examinations children were allocated to an express, academic or technical course in secondary education, reaffirming the principle of early specialization, though a limited amount of movement was allowed between different pathways.

Reforming the education system The Singaporean education system itself had been substantially reformed and it is perhaps worth reflecting on this process in relation to those enabling conditions that allowed this to happen. Change within an education system is a complicated enterprise because a number of activities have to be coordinated and a number of barriers to implementation and institutionalization overcome. Singapore already had in place a set of conditions that allowed educational reforms to be more fully received and implemented by those at the grass roots. These conditions comprised a relatively compact and small society irrespective of ethnic differences and, above all else, genuine hierarchical systems of

Statism and the Singapore Model

139

control operating at every level of the systems, so that even those reforms which purported to give greater autonomy to teachers in their classrooms could be better delivered by a supposedly more efficient and highly focused administration. Different forms of pedagogy, that is, less reliance on didactic methods of delivery, use of small-group work, the adoption of discovery methods in the classroom, and new forms of knowledge development, can be prescribed, internalized and delivered in the first instance more efficiently by teachers accustomed to being told what to do and how to teach, even if in the long term this greater degree of pedagogic freedom also means that the way teachers understand their place and position in the system changes over time. What changed in Singapore was a partial substitution of one authority by another; so that the state authority was replaced by an allegiance to a form of codified knowledge, which research suggested was the most efficient and effective way of delivering the curriculum. A second local condition is the size of the school system. Since the school population in Singapore is small compared with many other countries, this enabled close monitoring of the reforms and ease of implementation as they were being introduced. Furthermore, it has been suggested that certain types of reforms are more likely to be successful than others. What this means is that the same programme of reform delivered in different countries will have different effects on the different elements of the system and will have different histories within the system. In Chapter 2 we categorized effect and history in five ways: point of entry into the system and direction of flow, sustainability of the integrity of the reform, intensity of the reform or capacity to effect change, malleability of the system or capacity to change and institutionalization processes. With regard to the first of these, point of entry and direction of flow, it is possible to suggest that broadly three models depicting direction of flow can be identified: a centrally controlled policy process where the direction is unidirectional, downward oriented and ideologically monistic (this fits the Singaporean process of educational reform); a pluralist model where the direction of flow is still unidirectional; however, the developmental flow is to all parts of the system and the ideological orientation is pluralist; and a fragmented and multi-directional model where new policy is always in a state of flux as policy texts are received and interpreted at different points in the system and the process is understood as fragmented, non-linear, contested and as a place where original intentions are rarely fulfilled in practice. Singapore then more obviously conforms to the first model depicted here.

140

Interventions in Education Systems

The second of these elements is the sustainability of the integrity of the reform over time. What we mean by this is the capacity of the reform to retain its original shape, form and content as it is disseminated through the system, and this means that in the long process of formulation of the reform to application or implementation, the sustainability of the original integrity of the reform is either strongly or weakly realized. In Singapore, since independence, the reforms initiated by successive governments were able to retain their integrity during the process of implementation, and this in part reflects the hierarchical power structures that were strongly maintained during this period. The last three features are the intensity of the reform, the malleability of the system and its capacity for institutionalization. These refer to the structure of the reform or the way it is constituted, and the effects it has on what it is seeking to change. In Singapore, the three phases of reforms were introduced with little resistance and in part this was because, as we will see, there were common elements to each of them over time. However, it is important not to understand these three phases as separate and disconnected with few commonalities between them. Though on the surface there had been a radical shift in direction, supported by the rhetoric supplied by the government, this should be treated with some scepticism. What is common to these successive reforms is the creation and maintenance of a system that allows the production of an elite cadre of skilled technocrats for the furtherance of economic success. Three separate but related practices are ever present, albeit in different manifestations, in the three phases of educational reform in Singapore. The first of these is a belief that the state, as we have seen, needs to have command of the control of the skills, knowledge and dispositions of its population, and that this is needed to create the conditions for the successful delivery of a market place economy. In short, there needs to be different types of workers, with sufficient levels of expertise, to populate the different strata of the economic system. The imperative is fundamentally economic and the rationale behind the development of the curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation is instrumental. The second common practice is the underpinning manifestation of the curriculum and the way it is delivered throughout the three phases of educational reform in Singapore. This can be expressed in terms of a number of propositions: traditional knowledge forms and strong insulations between them need to be preserved; each of these knowledge forms is expressed in terms of lower and higher level domains and the latter have to be taught before the former and sequenced correctly; certain groups of children are better able to access the

Statism and the Singapore Model

141

curriculum than other children, and thus a differentiated curriculum is necessary to meet the needs of all school learners; the teacher’s role is to impart this body of knowledge in the most efficient and effective way, and therefore their brief cannot concern itself with the ends to which education is directed, but only the means for its efficient delivery; and the school’s role is to deliver a public service that meets the targets set for it by governments (cf. Scott 2008). The third practice common to the three phases is an emphasis on nationbuilding through the creation of a national ethos, although this is manifested in different ways in the three phases of reform. In the first phase, the emphasis is on creating a coherent sense of nation and nationality, among its people, and this, it is suggested, can be most effectively achieved through specific education practices; in the second phase, the emphasis is on nation-building as an economic phenomenon, in other words, the successful creation and institutionalization of a market-based economy by finding a niche suitable to a small geographically well-located entity; and in the third phase, the nation-building exercise is to garner esteem and economic reward at an international level. One manifestation of this is success in international league tables of performance; a nation’s elevated position in these league tables becomes part of the folkloric account a nation gives of, and to, itself and adds to a myth of efficiency that can bolster its international reputation for efficiency and probity. Since this account is an important part of a nation’s identity, then success in an international test such as PISA becomes even more important. There are also, as we have suggested in this chapter, extra-national elements in the process. However, it would be naive to see the process of globalization as deterministic, linear, inevitable, all-embracing and to understand global influences as being more powerful than national interests and agendas. In Singapore, as in England, Finland and Mexico, we are suggesting that national and local issues and processes are paramount. The global educational agenda is mapped onto what already exists at the national/local level, resulting in contingent, unpredictable and contested situations. A notion of vernacular globalization (cf. Lingard 2000) can therefore be more appropriately applied to the Singapore context. The city-state of Singapore has been extraordinarily successful in identifying and carving out a niche for itself as a middle manager for international capitalism. It has been able to create a compliant work force but also one that is capable of problem-solving within established parameters. That is, the workforce can be creative and inventive within the confines of their work

142

Interventions in Education Systems

while not allowing this innovative capacity to contaminate or undermine their allegiance to the state that created and maintains the system. This is an example of the limited type of problem-solving that is the essence of successful middle management. And Singapore serves as archetypal example of this. In the next chapter we provide another study of systems-change, but one which resulted in a very different education system. This is the educational reform process in Finland.

7

Finland’s Educational Revolution

The great majority of the relatively homogeneous Finnish population, numbering no more than 5.4 million, is less than two generations removed from its agrarian roots. Indeed, contemporary urban Finland with its concentration on research and development, principally in the electronics and high-technology industries, is of very recent origin. It is a product of a state-sponsored exodus from the countryside into a booming tertiary sector that started in the 1960s and that observers argue owes its success to a series of timely and far-reaching educational innovations (cf. Finnish Education in a Nutshell 2012; Finnish Minister of Education and Sciences 2010). As recently as 50 years ago Finland was still a country dominated by small-scale rural-based freeholders, with the agricultural and forestry industries largely in the hands of small and independent producers, who came into their own with the dissolution of the estates as a result of the great agrarian reform movements of the 1920s (Jörgensen 2006). The educational initiatives at the heart of these changes were set in motion by sometimes formal and more usually tacit alliances based on commonly shared perceptions, values and goals of the Finnish Social Democratic Party (Suomen Sosialdemokraattinen Puolue (SDP)), and the very active and pivotal Agrarian League (Maalaisliitto), its successors, such as the Centre Party (Suomen Keskusta), and, to a certain extent, even the recently formed populist Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset). As late as the 1960s when the first education reforms were enacted, almost 50 per cent of the population lived off the land. In stark contrast today about 20 per cent are employed in high-technology electronics, a further 20 per cent in machinery, metallurgy and engineering, and about 20 per cent of the population work in modernized chemical and forestry industries, where the manufacture of paper and the transformation of pulp are now based on state-of-the-art processes. About 25 per cent of the active population are public employees who work in the greatly expanded welfare sector. The encouragement of these modern industries required the rapid creation and dissemination of

144

Interventions in Education Systems

new skills, especially for those who worked in the more traditional industries. The transformation of the working population in England, France and Germany took decades, whereas in Finland it occurred in less than a single generation, aided and abetted by the creation of modernizing educational institutions and practices unique to Finland (cf. Tuovinen 2008; and Välijärvi 2012). The progress that has been made is little short of phenomenal and Finland’s success is underpinned by particular contextual features: a strong sense of professional independence, sprung, as we will see, from a particular sociocultural economic configuration of its productive sector, fed by agrarian and social democratic precepts built on an underlying Lutheran religious ethic of hard work and devotion to duty through cooperation. This unique conjuncture provided the foundations of a well-financed education system (cf. Välijärvi 2012). Inventing durable and viable educational structures and suitable practices almost from scratch was an immense task. As Välijärvi (2012) reminds us, in 1950 only 27 per cent of 11-year-old Finns were enrolled in the equivalent of grammar schools, designed for the most part to train the intelligentsia, and there were very few institutions providing a relevant technical education. The system consisted of two-tiers copied largely from Germany, in which, at the end of the fourth year of primary school, students were separated into an academic stream, consisting of eight further grades leading to higher education, and what was called a civic stream, that was intended to lead to employment or vocational schools. One should hardly be surprised that a society so overwhelmingly rural in character, and where in the more industrialized areas apprenticeship schemes provided all the skills necessary for work, would be anything but poorly educated, with the vast majority leaving school after no more than 6 or 7-years of a very basic formal education. How do contemporary Finnish educational institutions and practices based on principles of co-operative self-reliance and development, mediated by a strong moral belief in the collective good, relate to these momentous changes and simultaneously to success in international examinations? The model seems to conform to the Durkheimian [1893] (1982) notion of organic solidarity, the hallmark of pre-industrial societies where linkages providing for social order are largely moral in nature, and, as Chaynov [1924] (1967) argues, integral to people raised in pre-industrial peasant societies. In such societies individuals are seen as being responsible for their actions, invisibly monitored by the social collective. It hints at a notion of mechanical solidarity, which according to Durkheim (op. cit.) is the essence of a society that is founded on a strong sense of

Finland’s Educational Revolution

145

moral imperative. It is based on shared responsibilities, a notion of co-operation rather than competition and a strong belief in social welfare and individual achievement within and on behalf of the collective. Writing at a time when France was experiencing the consequences of a belated industrial revolution that required large parts of the population to move from rural to urban areas and from one type of social solidarity to another, Durkheim did not envisage a transition as rapid as that as experienced by Finland, where it consisted of progressing directly from a rural society to a society with a predominant tertiary sector, a hallmark of mechanical solidarity, without passing through the intermediate phase of mass production and its associated social division of labour. Indeed, while Finland has experienced structural change as profound as that of any other industrializing country, coupled with rapid economic growth over the past few decades, there has been an underlying institutional continuity. Commentators as different as Pasi Sahlberg (2013) and Hannu Simola (2002) maintain that the mindset and attitudes to work, and the relationship between the private and the public, have undergone little change. This could provide the kernel of an explanation as to why Finland has seemingly retained these educational values of cooperation and integrity, which are usually thought of as characteristic of the organic solidarity of a largely rural society based on small-scale production and a restricted organization of labour. The three phases of the development of Finnish education identified by Aho et al. (2006) and Sahlberg (2013) can serve as a preliminary guide to our understanding of the evolution of its institutions and practices. In the first of these, between 1945 and 1968, the government created free-of-charge, and equity-promoting, education institutions and practices. It reasoned that postwar Finland with little or no primary wealth and a small population, living under the shadow of the vicissitudes of the Soviet Union, and wedded to traditional values such as equity, cooperation and responsibility, could only survive if it focused on the strength and potential of its human resources and being at the forefront of the cutting edge of technological development. The priority was a root-and-branch restructuring of educational institutions and practices. Piecemeal reforms were initiated that achieved their apotheosis in the School System Act of 1968, subsuming all previous legislation and laying the foundations for subsequent reforms. The language of the 1968 Act gives us a clue as to the moral imperatives that are embedded in Finnish life: equal educational opportunities for all with education conceived as a basic human right; schooling based on cooperation and not competition; the personalization

146

Interventions in Education Systems

of learning; the creation of a system that is not reliant on external accountability systems; the goal of developing the talent of each individual and designing teaching and learning programmes according to their needs; redefining school time to reflect those tasks; and a systematic attention to social justice. Hence, the first phase was concerned with establishing the institutional groundwork for the new system through the integration of the hitherto separate civic and middle schools into one single system of institutions and practices, true to the principles of promoting a cooperative society based on what the Finns called pluralism, pragmatism and, above all, equity. In this period, we find the re-organization of primary and secondary education, initially derived from Sweden with some minor adaptations, with the express purpose of promoting equal opportunities in and through education. To match these reforms in education a comprehensive system of welfare services was established. Hence, the driving force behind the reforms was the setting up of institutions for a universal system of state comprehensive schooling, open and free to all, with a special emphasis on technological innovation and contextualized by the needs and possibilities of the welfare state (cf. Sarjala 2013; and Linnkylä and Välijärvi 2005). The second phase, between 1968 and 1985, witnessed the further develop­ ment of these institutions and practices. One of the first steps to achieve these ambitious aims was a thorough reform of teacher training. From 1971 teachers were to be trained in universities through programmes that emphasized a close relationship between the theoretical and the practical and the need to personalize education to suit the needs of individual pupils as described in the 1968 Act. From 1978 all teachers were expected to have a Master’s degree in education with an emphasis on pedagogy and research as well as curriculum development. However, even in the light of these reforms, the achievement gap between students remained stubbornly large, and this was blamed on practices of streaming students into groups (cf. Sahlberg 2007). That is, the gap between competence and performance was felt to be far too wide, and steps were taken to correct this by abolishing streaming, and, in the case of mathematics and languages, grouping by levels of achievement. It led to the devolution of planning decisions to the schools themselves and their local authorities. Having paid considerable attention to the development of comprehensive education, the planners and reformers after lengthy and thorough discussions with stakeholders establi­shed a core national curriculum. At the same time heterogeneous groupings of students became the norm in order to favour lower achievers, but without lowering the level of the most advanced students (cf. OECD 2007).

Finland’s Educational Revolution

147

The third phase has lasted from 1985 to the present day, and it has largely been concerned with developing how the system was managed in order to create a system conducive to maintaining and strengthening its avowed aims to fit with Finland’s new identity as a high-technological and knowledge-based economy. Building upon previous institutional reforms and the availability of newly trained teachers and administrators, decision-making powers, bolstered by adequate financial safeguards, were devolved to individual schools and local authorities. Attention was focused, in part, on developing practices of special needs education and further developing teacher training programmes based upon the principles of autonomy, responsibility and respect. Given the nature and philosophy of the system, Finland rejected external accountability processes, standardization, and an examination-based curriculum, replacing them with internal self-assessment processes in schools. No national testing was put in place for the school system and the only standardized examinations that were developed were to take place at the end of upper secondary schooling when students reached 18 or 19 years of age (cf. Sahlberg 2013). Until 1998 students attended the nearest comprehensive school to their homes but in that year as a result of parental pressures, this was altered to allow a measure of choice. Until 2012 there was little variation between schools with even the worst performing schools reaching international levels in mathematics, science and language (2010). However, despite official statements to the contrary, Finland enthusiastically participates in international examinations and takes the resulting league tables seriously. Many, like Pasi Sahlberg, were pleasantly surprised that their 15-year-old pupils excelled in the PISA examinations (OECD 2008, 2013),1 despite Finland having an educational system that was very much the opposite of the one recommended by the OECD and other international institutions. While Sahlberg and other observers have insisted that Finnish pupils do well in these examinations because of their cooperative as opposed to competitive educational system, the government was not quite convinced, and, in order to maintain their position in these league tables, set up a special section of the Ministry of Education to foster good performance in such examinations. However, Finland has performed less well than in the past in the most recent PISA examination, even if one makes allowances for the assessment-driven systems of a group of Asian countries, and there has been a widening of the gap between the best and worst performing percentiles of students. As of yet no official explanation has been offered, although Simola et al. (2002) suggested some time ago that the emphasis on devolution of responsibility within the system could well begin to increase the extent of social exclusion, and thus widen

148

Interventions in Education Systems

the gap between the worst and best performing parts of the country. According to Sahlberg (2012), Välijärvi (2012) and official government publications, the results in the various international tests are testimony to the success of the particular and specific teaching and learning approaches established in the system, though it is important to reflect on the methods and technologies used to determine this.

The current system Because of the unusual if not unique pattern of devolved responsibility, and systems of control and accountability in Finnish comprehensive (basic) and upper secondary education, it is best to look at how the division of power, authority, duties and management is defined before proceeding to a discussion as to how it functions in practice. Based on the administrative underpinnings of Finnish education described above, the central government determines the general objects of basic and upper secondary education and the division of classroom hours between different subjects (Basic Education Act 628/1998, Basic Education Degree, 652/1998, Government Degree of General objective and distribution of lesson hours 20.12.2001/1435). The National Board of Education, responsible to the Ministry for enhancing effectiveness and monitoring educational provision, decides on the aims and the core contents of teaching in the different subjects, inscribing them in a national core curriculum (National Curriculum Framework for Basic Education, FNBE 2004a,b, 2012, 2014). These constitute the basis for the curricula of schools and local authorities. Every 4 years the government produces a development plan for education and science. To do so it engages in systematic gathering of assessment information, relying on research institutions and university faculties as well as local authorities and organizations representing teachers. The resulting policy framework is outlined in a development plan for education, and this information-gathering exercise gives the process greater legitimacy and credibility. While guidance is provided by centrally established national norms and the core curriculum, the implementation is carried out at a local level  and its central feature is a spirit of trust between the central administration and the local authorities. In legal terms the local municipalities have a strong role in and considerable responsibility for planning, arranging and assessing work in the schools, and this is strengthened by the informal network of contacts permitted by the small

Finland’s Educational Revolution

149

size of the educational establishment and the movement of personnel between the central government, research and training institutions, schools and local government. That is, the actual curriculum planning and organization are the responsibility of schools and municipalities and this depends on teachers being provided with the tools, the time to develop and manifest a deeper curriculum knowledge and planning expertise, in-school assessment through pre-service and in-service training, and an obligatory Master’s degree designed to foster these skills within a framework of cooperative and personalized learning. They are expected to focus on ‘systematic, theoretically grounded school wide improvement efforts’ (Sahlberg 2011: 46), as opposed to what they characterize as narrow and fragmented drilling of students to raise test scores. Another salient characteristic of the Finnish system is the abandonment of standardized testing so common in other countries. Three principal reasons have been given (OECD 2010a). The system gives ‘a high priority to personalised learning and creativity as an important part of how schools operate’ (Välijärvi 2012: 32); therefore, students’ progress is assessed in terms of individual development. Education authorities ‘insist that curriculum, teaching, and learning, rather than testing, should drive teachers’ practice in schools’ (ibid.). And finally, ‘(d)etermining students’ academic performance and social development are seen as a responsibility of the school, not the external assessors’ (ibid.). Hence, the core principles of the Finnish system include the following: a common curriculum throughout the entire system of comprehensive and upper secondary schooling; extensive and effective teacher education through research-based Master’s degree programmes; teachers and schools making decisions about what and how to teach autonomously, with little direct interference by the central education authority; no external standardized tests used to rank students or schools; the provision of resources for those who need them most, special education services, and transportation to schools; and high standards and supports for special needs students (cf. Ministry of Education and Culture 2013a,b,c). In terms of the classroom and local authorities, Sahlberg (2007: 46) defines accountability as ‘something that is left when responsibility is taken away . . . teaching children to be more responsible for their behaviour is a typical feature from one classroom to another in a Finnish classroom’. Sahlberg (2007), contrasting the Finnish accountability system with global education reform trends, describes the system as being based on intelligent accountability, on

150

Interventions in Education Systems

flexibility and loose standards that builds on good practices and innovations in school-based curriculum development, learning targets and networking (in contrast to centrally prescribed performance standards for schools, teachers and students); broad learning programmes that give equal value to an individual’s personality, creative potential, knowledge and skills (in contrast to a focus on basic reading, writing, mathematics and the natural sciences); and intelligent accountability, with policies that gradually build a culture of trust within the education system that values teachers’ and principals’ professionalism in judging what is best for students and in reporting their learning progress (in contrast to raising student achievement through processes of inspection and rewards and punishments for schools and teachers based on the outcomes of standardized testing). The Basic Education Act, the General Upper Secondary Schools Act, the Vocational Education and Training Act, the Liberal Adult Education Act and the Act on Basic Education in the Arts set out the basis for the mandatory evaluation of education. In 2003 the government established the Finnish Education Evaluation Council drawing on personnel from the seven universities. In terms of local authorities, education providers have a statutory duty to evaluate their own activities and participate in external evaluations. Evaluation is used to collect data in support of educational policy decisions and as a background for information and performance-based steering. Performance within the system is evaluated locally, hallmarked by an emphasis on self-evaluation, regionally and nationally, in addition to Finland’s participation in international reviews such as PISA (Jakku-Sihvonen et al. 2002). The findings are fed back into the ongoing general appraisal of the education system, the core curricula and teaching and learning programmes. These findings are compared to international comparative data, providing an additional tool for monitoring to what degree equality and equity in education are realized. The system of inspection was discontinued in the early 1990s and this weakened the power of the central administration, limiting its work to guidance and steering.

Curriculum development In terms of curriculum development, the key document is the National Curriculum Framework for Basic Education (cf. FNBE 2004a,b, 2012, 2014).2 Though some curriculum reform in Finland is top-down, changes to teaching and learning practices are initiated at the municipality and school levels, and

Finland’s Educational Revolution

151

are driven by well-trained teachers operating within schools and clusters of schools. In addition, this devolution of responsibility for the curriculum (this is understood in its widest sense, so that it includes pedagogy and evaluation/ assessment) and decision-making about the curriculum to schools and teachers has resulted in weakly framed networked approaches to curriculum integration and a prioritization of formative rather than summative forms of assessment in the system. Hence, the approach developed in Finland gives the centrally constructed core curriculum an important role: on the one hand, it is an administrative steering document, on the other a tool for teachers to develop their own pedagogical methods and approaches (cf. Vitikka et al. 2011). The first national curriculum was developed in 1970 and it was a strongly centralized affair. It was reformed in 1985 as a result of the 1983 Basic Education Act,3 which emphasized decentralization and strong teacher autonomy. As we have suggested above, streaming was a common practice in schools, a vestige from the time of two parallel education systems. The curriculum reforms discontinued this practice and set higher standards for all students. Municipalities were given more decision-making powers, and individual student needs became the focal point of education. The decentralization process continued during the 1990s. The curriculum reforms of 1994 gave the municipalities a still greater degree of autonomy. Previously all textbooks had been monitored, and school inspectors regularly visited schools, but these practices were discontinued. However, there were some moves to a stronger expression of centralized control in the 2004 curriculum reform, for example, for the first time, national criteria for student assessments were introduced (cf. Kaihari-Salminen 2006). Curricular and pedagogic decisions are made by the schools, in conjunction with local municipalities, even though the curriculum is developed within the national framework, while taking into account the local context. While the National Curriculum provides the guidelines, teachers are given wide responsibility and the freedom to flexibly incorporate teaching methods, learning material and assessments into their teaching programmes (cf. Galloway 2008). Within these guidelines teachers along with headteachers make decisions on what and how to teach (cf. Ravitch 2013). Here, the official text suggests that (i)n Finland, the national core curriculum is a framework for making local curricula. It determines a common structure and basic guidelines that the

152

Interventions in Education Systems

local curriculum makers, school officials and teachers, use in order to build a local, context driven curriculum. The National Core Curriculum has two parts. It includes the objectives and core contents of teaching for all school subjects, also describes the mission, values, and structure of education. It also describes the conception of learning and goals for developing the learning environment, school culture and working methods. (FNBE 2011: 1)

The current curriculum system in Finland is based on three principles: management by goals given in legislation and in the national core curriculum; a degree of autonomy for the municipal authorities in providing and organizing education; curriculum steered at a local level; and the utilization of teachers as valued experts who develop the school-based curriculum as a source for different approaches to schoolwork (cf. Vitikka et al. 2011). However, given the establishment of new coordinating bodies it is possible that in the future, this could be restricted. According to Linda Darling-Hammond (2009: 40) the Finnish practice has been to develop a more effective pedagogy based on students being able to contextualize learning by problem solving and the personalized support given by teachers with expectations being individualized. In addition, teaching and learning processes tend towards dialogic rather than didactic approaches. Typical Finnish students are likely to determine their own weekly targets with their teachers in specific subject areas and choose the tasks they will work on at their own pace. In a typical classroom, students are likely to be walking around, rotating through workshops or gathering information, asking questions of their teacher, and working with other students in small groups. They may be completing independent or group projects or writing articles for their own magazine. The cultivation of independence and active learning allows students to develop metacognitive skills that help them to frame, tackle, and solve problems; evaluate and improve their own work; and guide their learning processes in productive ways. (Darling-Hammond 2009: 40)

Two broad general pedagogic approaches can be identified: didactic, instruc­ tional, assessment-driven, goal-directed and fact-based forms of learning; and dialogic, interrogative, problem-solving, experiential and reflective forms of learning. Most reforms of education systems in the world now emphasize assessment-driven, goal-directed and fact-based forms of learning. In Finland, however, the emphasis is on the latter, as Linda Darling-Hammond (ibid.) goes onto suggest:

Finland’s Educational Revolution

153

(t)he focus on instruction and the development of professional practice in Finland’s approach to organizing the education system has led, according to all reports, to an increased prevalence of effective teaching methods in schools. Furthermore, efforts to enable schools to learn from each other have led to what Michael Fullan (2006) calls ‘lateral capacity building’: the widespread adoption of effective practices and experimentation with innovative approaches across the system.

In part, this is because of the high level of training, at both pre-service and in-service levels, that all Finnish teachers receive (cf. Hendrickson 2012). However, Holland et al. (2007) has observed in Finland classrooms lessons that do not conform to the model described by Darling-Hammond.

A professional workforce The key to the success of the educational reforms in Finland is the professionalism of its highly skilled and motivated workforce, where since 1978 teachers are required to undertake a 5–6-year rigorous programme of full-time study, and this is the one standardized element in its system of education. There is only one teacher preparation programme (as opposed to the proliferation of programmes, often unrelated to each other, in the United States, for example), taught in eight research universities. All teachers in Finland are required to successfully complete research-based Master’s degrees in their subject areas. As we have seen, this degree of training is of the utmost importance because the system relies on teachers being trusted to plan, set standards, develop assessments, make judgments and communicate with parents and the wider community. There is no undergraduate degree leading directly to entry into the teaching profession, as is the case in a number of countries. Välijärvi (op. cit.) points out that there are degree programmes for aspiring class teachers, comprehensive and upper ­secondary school subject teachers, as well as programmes for special needs teachers and student counsellors, but these blend into the syllabus of a Master’s degree, that all aspiring teachers must complete successfully. Education can be studied as a major area, but students must specialize in a subject such as primary school curriculum subjects, mathematics, physical education, music, English and so on. In addition to subject areas, students are required to study pedagogy and education theory, and these have to be supplemented by individual action research projects (Jakku-Sihvonen and Niemi 2006).

154

Interventions in Education Systems

The competition is such that only 10–15 per cent of applicants are accepted onto a teacher training programme. Acceptance is based on multiple measures, including an essay, an entrance test, an interview and evidence about motivation to teach (Ravitch 2013). The procedure is complex and comprehensive. The first part of the examination comprises applicants reading a book of around 200 pages, which consists of six or seven scientific articles that have been published previously in scientific journals. Questions cover all these articles. The second part of the examination comprises a team task, where four or five applicants work together to design an activity for children and then present an account of it in front of the admissions panel. The panel ascertains how applicants communicate, how they work together and how creative their ideas are. The third part involves a personal interview, where applicants are interviewed before they are accepted for teacher training. The training of Finnish teachers is in many ways unique. First, they must be thoroughly conversant in at least one subject mastered during their first degree. Second, their work at Master’s level is designed to make them active researchers and to reflect on and analyse their work all the time. As a result, professional development is understood as a process of reflection in action with different degrees of complexity and reflection on action where teachers are encouraged to experiment with and explore new practices, contents and procedures in their actual workplace contexts and to think about their relevance, usefulness and viability. Another key part of Master’s training is to persuade teachers to examine their own weltanschauungen and continue the process of lifelong learning. While the responsibility for teachers’ pre-service education rests with the universities, in-service training is provided by private as well as publicly funded organizations including teachers’ own associations. All teachers are required to attend in-service training courses for a minimum of three working days outside school hours each year. The responsibility for funding these courses lies with the schools and the local authorities, and individual employers decide the contents of these courses. Many teachers also participate in voluntary in-service training during the year. According to Piesanen et al. (2006) there are considerable differences in the amounts of continuing education and training being offered by the regions and the different teacher groups. Välijärvi (op. cit.) maintains that the provision for in-service training is poorly coordinated, the quality of the services varies to a great extent, and attention needs to be given to more coherently integrate pre-service and in-service training. There is evidence that since 2010 the Ministry has encouraged the development of new innovative models to provide longer-term programmes that suit both teachers and their schools.

Finland’s Educational Revolution

155

Finland and the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) Given that, in the recent PISA and other international testing exercises, Finland has performed relatively less well than in the past, those like Sahlberg (op. cit.) are less keen to emphasize the relative autonomy of schools, devolution of powers and the high level of responsibility given to teachers as the key to success (cf. Pearson Foundation 2011). Other critics like Simola (2005) see it as perhaps related to the gradual attrition of the welfare state and social democratic model. Still others would argue that the countries at the top of the PISA league teach to the test, reminding us that success in PISA is not equivalent to enhancing life chances and encouraging the creativity and imagination one requires to ensure the well-being of individuals within their social collectivity. While Simola (ibid.) has stressed in recent times that the changes in the system and the devolution of powers itself makes demands for citizens’ rights in education inconceivable as a result of the Finnish government abdicating ‘from the responsibility of education in general’, and interpret the shift to local authority responsibility as an excuse for ‘shifting the blame down the line’, at the same time even he and his colleagues admit that what they call the social-democratic ethic and discourse of caring, social responsibility, cooperative and an emphasis on team work dominate educational planning and thinking. If this is indeed the case, that even though the economic recession that gripped Finland during the 1990s, the sharpest and deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has not led to the abandonment of the populist agrarian-urban-social model at the heart of Finnish education, so very much implicated in its uniquely successful trajectory. To put it succinctly: Can Finland escape from what Sahlberg (2011) has labelled the GERM? So far we have examined closely four very different cases of interventions in education systems (in Mexico, England, Finland and Singapore) and how these systems changed as a result of these interventions. In the Conclusions to this book, we develop a more general model that attempts to explain how education systems change and we focus, above all else, on the distinctive, idiosyncratic and particular conditions in which they do so.

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

It is customary to speak of modern mass education as a system and indeed there is a great deal of sense in this for the reasons we explain below. However, describing education as a system risks ignoring the core of that activity, namely, that it is a set of profoundly personal acts of learning. Thus from the outset, any consideration of education needs to take into account the tension between the instinctive drive to learn and the systematic attempt to organize and control it. The root of this tension lies in the difference between the basic demand for access to learning opportunities for the satisfaction of needs (emotional, spiritual, material and intellectual) and the control and selection processes that education systems undertake. As a result, in all societies there is a dissonance between neoliberal rationality and broader social democratic progress. Whether change occurs or not depends on the capacity within the system as well as the condition of the change-catalyst or set of reforms. And these in turn are structured in particular ways, which determines their ability to act as change-agents. As we have suggested, certain types of catalyst are more likely to induce change in a system than others; for example, changes of personnel (caused naturally through retirements and deaths or by people in powerful positions within the system exercising their authority), new policies, events in nature, external interventions, new arrays of resources, new arrangements of roles and functions within a system, new financial settlements and so forth have different capacities to effect change in an education system. In short, some of these change-catalysts are more powerful than others, or at least have the potential to be more powerful. Even here though, the capacity of the catalyst to effect change within a system does not guarantee or determine whether change actually occurs. And self-evidently, it does not guarantee or determine the amount of change within the system, how long-lasting the reform is and what unexpected consequences there are from the introduction of these changes or reforms. Furthermore, some types of change-catalyst are more likely to be successful in inducing change within the system than others. This is not only because some

158

Interventions in Education Systems

of them are more powerful than others but also because their capacity to induce change fits better the change mechanism within the system being reformed. For example, in a system which has a high level of command structure between the coordinating body and its constituent parts, such as in Singapore, a policy for change at the classroom level which is underpinned by a strong system of rewards and sanctions is likely to be successful in inducing change at this level. This is in contrast to systems which grant greater degrees of autonomy to their teachers, and consequently the same change mechanism may have less chance of succeeding. Extra-national change-agents work in the same way and the OECD’s PISA system of international assessment is an example of this. What these globalizing bodies are attempting to do is establish a form of global panopticism (cf. Foucault 1979) where the activities of the various national systems are made visible to a supra-national body, with the consequence that all parts of the system are visible from one single point (cf. Gill 1992, 1995). However, what this needs is a single surface of comparison or at least a comparative mechanism that can do this, so that enough people have confidence in it for it to be considered useful. This also means that the national system is now placed within, and is therefore subject to, the influence of global mechanisms of standardization and control. The OECD model is an example of the way these globalizing bodies (and forces within nations) are seeking to replace a welfarist state with a neoliberal one. Barry et al. (1996: 14) point to the ‘development of techniques of auditing, accounting and management that enables a market for public services to be established from central control’. This means that a number of mechanisms or systems have to be put in place, some of these by international bodies, some by national governments: a minimal role for the state, market mechanisms, new public management, governance by comparison, an audit society, steering at a distance, governance by numbers and the use of mechanisms for allowing comparisons between students, teachers and schools. Four elements are necessary here: a strong marketization and individualization agenda, so that the individual or the individual class or the individual school is assigned responsibility for its actions, even if those actions are not necessarily under their control; choice and visibility such as consumer and parental choice mechanisms, high local accountability, and blame and responsibility ascriptions; ranking and classification as in national testing systems and league tables; visibility through inspection and monitoring systems;

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

159

strong quality assurance mechanisms, and sanctions and rewards on the basis of large-scale collected assessment data; and control over the collective efforts of the teaching workforce. This can be achieved in a number of ways such as loosening the ties between the individual and the collective body, and strong management and accountability practices at the level of the school. These are the intentions of these international bodies; however, as we have suggested, they are perhaps better described as aspirations rather than achievements; the drive towards a neo-liberal state is nationally and not globally orientated (cf. Green 1999). What we have been doing is categorizing the system (i.e. a national education system) as a set of institutions and relations between those institutions, or even as a coordinating body for a number of sub-systems, which have a particular relation to the state and a particular position within it. However, this doesn’t mean that the state (and, in particular, its boundaries and relations with other parts) and the education system (and its boundaries and relations with other systems) remain the same over time. The shrinking or at least attempted shrin­ king of the state (from welfarism to neo-liberality) involves a redefining of what the state is, what an education system is and what the relations between the two are. However, these relations (internally and externally oriented) may change for a number of possible reasons, for example, the invention of new ideas, natural progression, contradictions as historically accumulating structural tensions between open activity systems (cf. Engeström 2001) and so forth.

Education systems The key term that we have been struggling with here is system. We have been using the term throughout and will continue to use it in the rest of the book, though with the greatest reluctance and with the proviso that its meaning is always provisional. Indeed, some of us would prefer not to use the term at all, on the grounds that it is both positively misleading and distorting of those processes and practices that have so concerned us in this book. What do we mean by the term? It is fairly easy to understand it as a coordinating body that directs a number of sub-units, so that if the central authority demands action of a particular type, then these subsidiary bodies will implement its directives. The cohering element in the notion of a system being used here is that one body commands a series of other bodies, though all of them are considered to be

160

Interventions in Education Systems

elements of a system. However, it is rare for any actual system to function in this way. Within the system the extent and type of power that the coordinating body can exercise over the other elements may be differently exercised. For example, if we consider the English education system, one of its characteristics is that there is a small (about 7 per cent of students) but influential private sector (larger numbers of its alumni are to found higher up the system in high status universities, for example, and larger numbers of its alumni are to be found in powerful professions in society). Thus, a system’s coordinating body may have less or more direct relations with its parts. Again, it may be that some of these relations become so attenuated that it becomes harder to include them in the system. Private language schools are an example. Furthermore, systems have internal rules, that is, their elements are arranged in particular ways. Traditional systems have a high degree of specialization; a clearly defined division of labour; the distribution of official tasks within the organization; a hierarchical structure of authority with clearly defined areas of responsibility; formal rules which regulate the operation of the organization; a written administration; a clear separation between what is official and what is personal; and the recruitment of personnel on the basis of ability and technical knowledge. As we have discovered in a number of corporative-clientelist countries, and not least in Mexico, education systems can continue to function with different elements and different relations between them, even if we might want to describe them as dysfunctional. Our use of the concept of a system should not be confused with the way it is used within a structural-functionalist framework (cf. Parsons 1964), which understands society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. We are using it here to refer to complicated sets of arrangements that societies make to set in place structures for providing education for children in these societies, and here the notion of a system is not being used to mark out an end point such as stability, stasis, teleology or completeness, but only to refer to those institutional arrangements that all societies make. This doesn’t point to a functionalist perspective; however, what it does suggest is that arrangements of people and resources and allocations of people to functions and roles and the power arrangements that are the backdrop to decision-making are what constitute the system. Again, this doesn’t imply that any particular pattern of allocation or arrangement is either the best or even the most popular. What it suggests is that there is a variety of systems and that they work in different ways, as we found in our four country cases. Furthermore, those allocations and arrangements change over time.

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

161

Another way of thinking about it is as a unified body; coherence lies in its unity. The system is governed not through networks of power (usually one-way) but through its purposes or intentions. Thus, it might consist of a large number of separate entities that have a common purpose. If we look at the history of education systems (and perhaps especially England in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries) the system no longer appears to be coherent or unified, but it still continues to function, or at least seems to be doing so. We are suggesting that the system’s conceptual roots are neither political (i.e. they operate through wellestablished networks of power) nor administrative, but lie with data technology and surveillance (cf. Gough 1999). What unites the disparate parts of the system is the flows of performance data and their fine-grained analyses from all parts of the system. All the elements of the system – curriculum, policy flows, institutions, bureaucracies, systems of inspection, local authority systems of governance, central government controls, and the like – are now considered to be subservient to the element of data flows. The system coheres and is re-imagined in use through data and is no longer held together by mythologizing processes which coalesce round notions of unity, progression and relations (cf. Lawn 2006). We may even be able to think of the system as a linguistic device. All those entities, which we have come to define as parts of a system, have some common property, that is, they all relate to the nurturing of children or they all have a common educational function (even if this is hard to define). This of course would bring private language schools back into the fold as a good case could be made that they are educational institutions. However, language schools are not coordinated by a central body or have direct and commanding relations with that central body. Indeed, we should also acknowledge that the links (i.e. the relations between the parts) are descriptive or categorizing or classifying rather than causal or actual carriers of power.

Systems-change mechanisms Technical-rationality thinking makes the assumption that change can be predic­ ted or at least can be read off from the presumed effects of causal mechanisms. These causal mechanisms, then, are constituted by the idea that, if a set of common elements are present and combine together appropriately, this will always produce the same result. The understanding is that any set of causal mechanisms operates in a linear and predictable pattern and effects can thus be read off from causes that persist across time. Thus, educational systems are relatively stable,

162

Interventions in Education Systems

though within such systems there are mechanisms for improvement, such as meeting accountability demands. Complex systems thinking is premised on the idea that systems do not change in this simple way, but are non-linear, unpredictable and in effect at a meta level cannot be described (cf. Fenwick et al. 2010). This is chaos theory, not in the sense that one despairs of ever being able to describe, predict and propose changes to the system, but in the sense that the system is, in truth, complex. To reduce it to a set of demands for control by policymakers is to do it a disservice. We thus have a responsibility to try to understand it as it is. The logic of targets and standards only makes sense if one adopts an uncomplicated and non-complex view of the way a system operates. The need to build into our theory the non-predictability of reading off what is going to happen within a system is, as a result, essential. Objects and relations between objects change their form. An example of this change process at the epistemological level is the invention (in so far as the set of concepts and relations between them is new) of the notion of probability (cf. Hacking 1998) in the nineteenth century, and this changed the way social objects could be conceived and ultimately arranged. Change then can occur in four ways: contingent ontological, planned ontological, epistemically driven ontological, and in the transitive or realm of knowledge, epistemological (cf. Scott 2010). With regard to the example above, the invention of probability, two phases of change can be identified. The first is where knowledge is created and therefore operates at the epistemological level, the new arrangement of knowledge. The second is where this knowledge has real effects at the ontological level, so that new arrangements, new formations, new assemblages come into being. This last is an example of epistemically driven ontological change. The dilemma is that the social world, in contrast to the physical world, is always in a state of transition and flux, so that it is hard to argue that there are invariant laws by which the world works, at all times and in all places, except in a basic logical and rational sense. In trying to understand how interventions in education systems work then, in the first instance we need to remind ourselves of the principal elements of a public educational practice, namely, that it comprises the state’s deployment of human resources, its strategic hold over infrastructure and other material and financial resources, its mobilization of ceremonies, rituals, meanings and values, and its creation and maintenance of a central value system. Change to an education system is always a change to the status quo, to what already exists. Therefore, we need to understand how those systems and curricula are currently structured. What this means is that the same programme of reform delivered

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

163

in different countries is likely to have different effects on the different elements of the system and will have different histories within the system. We have categorized reform effect and history in five ways: point of entry into the system and direction of flow, sustainability of the integrity of the reform, intensity of the reform or capacity to effect change, malleability of the system or capacity to change, and institutionalization processes. There are also exogenous or extra-national influences, although we have to be clear that these globalizing pressures do not determine policy and practice within particular countries in an overarching way. Globalization comprises a process of policy and practice convergence between different nations, regions and jurisdictions in the world. As we have suggested in this book, this can occur in a number of ways. The first is through a process of policy-borrowing or policylearning, where the individual country is the recipient of policies from other countries or even from a collection of other countries. These processes impact in complex ways on educational practices, and not only on state-sponsored ones. The second is through the direct impact of supra-national bodies which have power and influence over member countries and which are seeking harmonization of national educational policies and practices. The third is a more subtle approach and this is where the supra-national body does not deal in policies or practices but in a common currency of comparison. The fourth process that potentially allows convergence is the autochthonous response of each national system of education to a common imperative from outside its jurisdiction, though clearly this encourages divergence rather than convergence. The fifth is a direct response to globalization pressures by a nation, region or jurisdiction. However, we have suggested in a number of places in this book that globalizing processes are always likely to be tempered by national and local preoccupations, concerns and interests.

The country cases We have identified a move, in some but not all countries in the world, from a Keynsian Welfare state to a Schumperterian Workfare state (cf. Carayannis and Ziemnowicz 2007) and England is most obviously an example of this. Jessop (1994: 30) suggests that ‘(i)n narrow economic terms, the neo-liberal strategy demands changes in the regulation (governance) of both public and private sectors. For the public sector, it involves privatisation, liberalisation, and an imposition of commercial criteria in any residual state sector’. This neo-liberal

164

Interventions in Education Systems

strategy is not just about the introduction of markets as the best way to allocate and distribute resources (all other ways are inefficient, wasteful and not respon­ sive to new ideas, new products and enterprise), but also to the creation of a new moral environment for both consumers, and perhaps more fundamentally producers. This is what might be called a culture of self-interest, though the argument put forward by neo-liberal philosophers (cf. Smith [1776] (1977)) is that if everyone pursues their own self-interest, this will contribute to the common good and the fulfilment of everyone’s needs. What has to be acknowledged is that those needs are not universal to all societies, but are a product of these new social arrangements. Even though some commentators have suggested that this involves a ‘pauperisation of moral concepts in the public sphere’ (Bottery 1992: 93), this, it is argued, involves a misunderstanding of the nature of those moral concepts. It is not so much that immorality has replaced morality, but that one set of values has replaced another. The neo-liberal perspective further understands both unionism and bureau-professionalism (seen in its most destructive forms in relation to English higher education institutions) as examples of failure in planned public provision, and of course as impediments to the development of markets that work. Other casualties in the neo-liberal revolution are professionalism and collegiality. Professionalism is replaced by a strong form of accountability either to the consumer, or the institution, or shareholders, and collegiality is replaced by competition and performative comparison. Furthermore, they play on the ‘insecurity of the disciplined subject’ (Ball 1997: 261). This is what Foucault describes as a constructive rather than coercive form of power. As we have been arguing throughout this book, no one model is a perfect representation of what actually happens and thus the state (in its old and preneoliberal form) also intervenes directly in various ways; for example, all our four countries (Mexico, England, Singapore and Finland) have a national curriculum, though it is conceived of in different ways in each of them, and furthermore, its modus operandi is different in these four countries. The continued intervention by the state in even the most neo-liberal country still tends to encourage organizational characteristics of what Mintzberg (2004) calls ‘machine bureaucracies’. Indeed there are always forms of resistance, resulting in hybrid organizational forms coming into existence. However, what we now have is a Hayekian concept of liberty, that is, freedom from, rather than freedom to do this or that, and of course, the almost sacred right to choice. Active choice will revivify society, lead to a more efficient public sector, release

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

165

natural enterprising tendencies in its citizens, destroy the dependency culture and promote self-help and self-responsibility, or so it is suggested. There are different versions of neo-liberalism, some strong, some weak, in use in different countries in the world, and indeed, in our four country cases. Public education is based on ideas like egalitarianism, the possibilities of a professional career and a fulfilled life and the informed and responsible participation of citizens in public affairs. With increasing economic pressure on nation states, often subsumed under the guise of globalization, education policies and institutions are expected to respond increasingly to the exigencies of the economic. On the curricular level, there is, as a consequence, a move towards vocationally oriented curricula, an emphasis on the actual ability or competence of students to apply their knowledge in real-world contexts and on life-long learning. At the structural level strikingly similar trends can be observed. Many national education systems attempt to achieve international accreditation or comparability of programmes, increase accountability of schools and teachers, decentralize financial and other responsibilities, evaluate their students’ performance against international standards, and improve the professional preparation and development of their teachers. At the same time, there are attempts to homogenize heterogeneous education systems inside of individual countries through the identification and description of learning objectives and educational processes. Despite the internal heterogeneity of education systems (which make international comparisons a complicated matter), they are still embedded in and to a great extent organized and managed by nation states. International differences are therefore usually greater than intra-national ones. National education systems for instance differ significantly in terms of organizational structure, government expenditure, political goals and educational purposes associated with different types of schools (primary, secondary and tertiary), relations between the different types of schools, curricular contents, processes and practices, the professional background, social status and level of income of teachers, their opportunities for professional development and so forth. External factors such as the economic and political situation of a country, and infrastructural and demographic issues, also differ widely and impact profoundly upon the nature and quality of teaching and learning. Contextual differences between countries and their institutions hence limit comparability and consequentially transferability of educational practices and reforms from one country to another. We have further cast doubt on the idea of a transnational governance of education systems and

166

Interventions in Education Systems

shown through a case study of the workings of the OECD in Chapter 3 that such transnational initiatives are always circumscribed by national and local interests, processes and concerns. We have chosen to develop four country cases to illustrate the different ways policy and practice are transformed and developed in real-life settings. In Mexico, the unfolding of a policy from its initial development to its implementation inhabits two worlds. In the one, the formal bureaucratic structure is laid out in the official organizational chart and this is the basis for the way policy flows are meant to operate. Normally, policy flows down through a vertical chain of command with occasional lateral movements for coordination purposes. The other world is that of the network, which is driven by private, political and economic interests, and in which individuals and groups compete for power, status and material rewards. All state administrations inhabit these two worlds. What makes the Mexican case relevant for studying policy implementations is that here the checks on private interests are much weaker than in Finland or in England. Three separate but related practices are ever present, albeit that they have different manifestations in the three phases of educational reform in Singapore. The first of these is a belief that the state needs to have command of the control of the skills, knowledge and dispositions of its population, and that this is needed to create the conditions for the successful delivery of a market place economy. The imperative is fundamentally economic and the rationale behind the development of curriculum, pedagogic and evaluative practices is instrumental. The second common practice relates to the way the curriculum is structured, with strong insulations between the different elements and weak relations between pedagogy and assessment. And the third common practice is an emphasis on nation building through the creation of a national ethos, although this is manifested in different ways in the three phases of reform. The core principles of the Finnish system include the following: a common curriculum throughout the entire system; extensive and effective teacher education through research-based Master’s degree programmes; teachers and schools making decisions about what and how to teach autonomously, with little interference by the central education authority; no external standardized tests used to rank students or schools; providing resources for those who need them most; and high standards and supports for special needs students. These arrangements in the Finnish system have come about through consensus and through the adoption of models of change that we have described as professional and involving partnerships between all the key stakeholders in the system.

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

167

In England we examined how a series of reforms were driven through at breath-taking speed and these transformed the system. We can thus characterize this as a continuous process of change, flux and perturbation, in which successive governments experimented with, intervened in and changed the governance of the system. Changing the types of rewards and sanctions for teachers, the criteria for judging quality within the system, the compliance capacity of the workforce and how they judged themselves and each other contributed to changing the learning experiences of children. We also focused on the important role the state plays in the formation and subsequent re-formation of the education system. These state formations, that is, laissez-faire, segmented-protectionist, corporative-clientelist, developmentalist and social democratic, which we set out in Chapter 1, were an attempt to explain the salient features of the social world in which education systems operate and to which they contribute. Some important themes have emerged: the degree to which the formal state education system relates to the economy and society and how this relationship plays out in practice; how closely integrated it is to other social goals and norms promoted by governments; the degree to which the education system is integrated with unofficial social interests, business, the independent sector and teachers as part of civil society; and the way this occurs, whether through consensus or confrontation. It is impossible to understand educational change, resistance to change, and implementation or lack of implementation, without grasping the subtle and changing relationships between social groups within an entity, their perceptions, aspirations and modes of action. Moreover, the need to manage the institutions set up as a result of the equilibrium between these groups adds another player, the administration or bureaucracy, and, as we have suggested, this can take different forms. International agencies can influence thinking; but generally the ideas that are adapted are those that fit with the existing balance of power between groups within an entity, filtered by organizations that manage power like political and corporativist organizations. Depending on these balances we have found different practices and different impediments or stimuli for making educational changes, even if they are always classified as reforms. Fundamentally, however, education is caught between the Scylla of attempting to set up a selection system based on merit and the Charybdis of maintaining social order, equilibrium and guaranteeing the reproduction of the system and its personnel. The first researchers in a field have the advantage of far greater control over space (the system of classification of knowledge) and time than those who follow later and who are now circumscribed by a set curriculum and time schedules.

168

Interventions in Education Systems

For  example, Émile Durkheim did not have these constraints and freely developed not only the content of his research but also his methods by being able to constantly refer back to a number of corpuses whose relevance was decided by its possible contribution to his area of investigation. The system for the training of researchers was similar to the medieval atelier, which meant that from the beginning they were responsible for actually doing research. The trend towards circumscribing the space and time of research in the name of professionalism requires investigation because there is rarely a positive relationship between the new professionalism and quality. This has been the case in the United States for a long time and is now becoming common in Europe. The generation of the founders of educational research and the sociology of education for whom the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of investigation were inseparable, and for whom the ‘ought’ conditioned the ‘is’, would be dismayed at the role and situation of those researchers and research programmes we have discussed. Émile Durkheim [1895] (1982), Max Weber [1905] (2002) and Joseph Rowntree (cf. Vernon 2005) had the advantage of the subject of their work and its timing being relatively context-free. Space and time were theirs to explore, no doubt also helped by the fact that they were largely free of the need to be permanently employed or were employed in prestigious institutions of higher education untainted by the need to seek finance for its daily activity either through the state or through private sponsoring bodies and institutions. They were largely unaccountable for their activities. What they would find and what is implicit in our country studies and our account of international institutions is a trend towards circumscribing the space and time of research in the name of professionalism. The teleological link, the commitment, the power to select research topics and determine the path of research in the name of creating equity have all but disappeared. There has been an unheralded proliferation in the number of researchers, their training has become more abstract, their identification is not so much with their subjects but with impressing the field and they work within the established systemic aims of their organizations without daring to question those aims and their associated methods. The massification of education has led to the need for more pervasive and subtle systems of control, evaluation in terms of product rather than outcomes, and systemic accountability based on a lack of trust not only in schools but in the research institutions as well. And these have resulted in accounts, which, in general, have marginalized notions of the way education systems play an important role in reproducing inequality.

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

169

Inequality Our four country cases (Mexico, England, Singapore and Finland) show in different ways and to different degrees how inequality is reproduced. Bourdieu’s (2005 and with Passeron 1977) notions of material capital, cultural capital and social capital may be helpful in explaining education’s role in creating and reproducing social divisions and economic inequalities. It is likely that the accumulation of each kind of capital works in different ways; it is also probable that the relationships between each are different. At the end of his seminal essay on forms of capital, Bourdieu (2005) attempts some broad approximations of the convertibility of one kind of capital to another. He introduces a notion of disguises (and risks) in the mobilization of cultural and especially social capital. The principal idea that he is developing here is that in the relationship between social and cultural capital on the one hand, and material capital on the other, disguise is fundamental. In other words the reproduction of advantages and disadvantages in society operates below the surface of everyday life. The paradox is that the institution in government that is most meritocratic, the education system, is also the institution that is most complicit in the reproduction of social inequality. Pierre Bourdieu (op. cit.), in relation to his work on the formation and transformation of cultural capital, and Basil Bernstein (1975/77), in relation to his work on restricted and elaborated codes, suggest that cultural capital overrides any levelling tendencies public education systems may have through the way the habitus operates, taking years, if not generations, to accumulate and then to dissolve. This is not immediately evident and educational policies and practices are not able to eradicate it overnight. Central to these notions of cultural capital and codes is that the accumulated advantages among the elite groups are disguised. Furthermore, behind the reproduction of social class divisions in education lie broader and more fundamental concerns of modern capitalist accumulations and these are manifested in neo-liberal policies. In this scenario, the role of the education system is to act as an efficient distributor of labour for the increasing demands made on it by society. In this book, we have been interested not only in the development of educational institutions but also in the evolution of social behaviours, which makes the analysis more complex, because it now has to take into account the webs of social meaning that constitute society, and hence the interrelationship, interplay or dialectic between the phenomenon we are investigating and its setting. That is, we have been concerned with how values are transmitted

170

Interventions in Education Systems

and institutionalized through systems of social apprenticeship, and how basic interpretative frameworks are established through socialization within the family and peer groups. These condition not only individual chances of educational success or failure but life chances as well. Hence, analysts, and this includes us, should be aware of, and concerned with, social constraints on learning, socialization, and social positioning within a given social entity, and how they are experienced in different ways by the social groups which constitute that society. Traditionally, the attempt to arrive at a description and explanation of social apprenticeship and social constraints has been the purpose of sociologists who have researched and written about education. The itinerary established through Émile Durkheim, the French anthropologists and the British sociologists has led to an agenda which includes not only how values are inculcated and reproduced, but also the role that the transmission and reception of knowledge plays in social reproduction, as well as the more practical question of how changes in educational institutions and practices can bring about changes in the social division of labour. Hence, in his lectures on moral education, ‘L’Education Morale’, Émile Durkheim [1898] (2012) tried to demonstrate how in a society with a complex division of labour one of the primary tasks of the school is to separate children from the immediacy of familial values, and inculcate them into their position in a new and supposedly superior moral order within the polity. He was also concerned with what he described as the moral question. If the division of labour succeeded in creating a cooperative, or as Durkheim fondly called it, a truly collective society based upon shared values, there wouldn’t be a problem. But given that the division of labour brought about by the industrial revolution substituted one form of inequality for another, he found it necessary to promote a form of moral education which could break the pattern of submission to aberrant rules and norms and possibly create a new and more productive one. For Durkheim (ibid.) and Mauss (op. cit.), the school was not only an object of study, but also the key to social change in that it could create the forms of social solidarity which should have developed naturally from the increasingly complex social division of labour. Bourdieu (op. cit.) developed a number of concepts in his quest to explain the structure of social reproduction, one of the elements in the Durkheimian agenda. He worked from three basic premises. The first of these was that an educational process could not be understood if its institutions were analysed as separate

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

171

from the socio-economic context in which they were situated. The second was that an educational process involves the construction and control of discourse, meanings and subjectivities. And finally, the common-sense values and beliefs that guide and structure any educational practice are not a priori universals, but social constructions based on specific normative and political assumptions. We cannot take these for granted and must regard them, as Bourdieu (2005) argues, as cultural arbitraries. Bourdieu (ibid.), for instance, suggests: Culture reproduces in transfigured and, therefore, unrecognisable forms the structure of prevalent socio-economic relationships. It produces a representation of the social world immediately adjusted to the structure of socio-economic relationships, which are consequently perceived as natural, so contributing to the symbolic buttressing of the existing balance of forces.

As a result, education systems are directly implicated in the reproduction of culture, even if they operate in different ways in the world.

Other education practices In spite of the overwhelming bureaucratization of public life there are pockets of educational practices that depart from those of mainstream schools and from which we can learn. Some of these practices bear a remarkable resemblance to the espoused intentions of governments but which, as we have suggested, have not been implemented as intended in Mexico, if not in our other three countries. As we have seen, there is a broad agreement that education should be childcentred, schools should be adequately equipped, teachers should be committed and well trained and parents should be able to fully participate in school affairs. We have also suggested that these intentions are routinely side tracked as a result of a whole series of administrative and professional incoherences and perverse incentives and sanctions. In discussing these experiences, useful lessons about policy implementation can be learnt. However, there are some promising examples of educational projects, even in such a dysfunctional system such as Mexico. Here, we can only mention a few such programmes (all of them in Mexico): the creative learning programme in the Wixarika Tatutsi in Jalisco; the development of tele-secondary schools in Contracorriente in Sierra Negra in Puebla, and in Casa de Ciencias in Chiapas; effective in-service teacher training in Zacatecas and in Queretaro;

172

Interventions in Education Systems

a variety of parental participation projects in Tatutsi, Jalisco; and intra- and inter-school collaboration projects in Zacatecas. The more recent curriculum reforms in Mexico make much of creativity and self-expression, especially but not only in relation to language. The Tatutsi secondary education centre, from the outset, unencumbered by high-stakes testing, emphasized self-expression that was anchored in cultural identity and as such has made this experience a vivid example of creative learning. Along with mainstream subject areas, Tatutsi students learn music, dance, theatre, traditional handcrafts, baking and their own language. The connection between hand and mind releases the expressive dimension so often absent in schools. Relying on participative leadership in the community the headteacher sponsored the curriculum design after careful consultation with the community. The Tatutsi Centre is independent of the mainstream education system. By contrast, in the Sierra Negra in Puebla we find an equally innovative approach to learning creativity situated in mainstream schools. A farsighted senior inspector picked up on a relatively untried but officially promoted learning approach, project learning and breathed life into it. A network of TV secondary schools voluntarily signed up to work in this way with the support of their communities, in large part because the projects they chose arose out of locally identified needs. This way of using projects contrasts with its frequently mechanical use in mainstream schools. This points to the importance of successful student and teacher learning being grounded at the school level in parental and community involvement and sound school and school district leadership. Policy only works when there is involvement at this level. A distinct approach to innovative teacher training is the Casa de CienciaINED support programme for teachers. In many rural areas, especially in remote, indigenous regions, materials, equipment and opportunities for upgrading are lacking. INED saw this as an opportunity to turn what had previously been its science museum in San Cristobal into a flexible outreach facility to develop improved pedagogies for science, language and mathematics in Chiapas. Its approach was to enrol teachers in its upgrading programmes on a voluntary basis, something that would not have worked, had it not being for the energetic involvement of the authorities, particularly the teachers’ union. Eventually the combination of helpful and innovative teaching methods and the flexible multi-institutional focus of the programme made it popular throughout the state.

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

173

Policy implementation We close this book with a reminder about how complex reforms in education systems are. There are four dimensions to policy implementation: making sure that the reform programme is comprehensive, satisfactory and serviceable; understanding how the implementation site is currently constructed; specifying how the current implementation site will need to be changed to accommodate the new initiative; and determining how this new initiative can be institutiona­ lized so that it functions effectively. We might want to call these four dimensions: the new programme structure; implementation sites; implementation capacity; and institutionalization and sustainability processes. The first element refers to the internal relations of the new practice that is to be transferred to a new setting (i.e. the new programme structure). A model of a new productive practice (or reform) has a number of characteristics. It has a set of elements arranged in a logically coherent way (i.e. an arrangement of resources, functions and roles for people in the system, and accountability relationships). It has a causal narrative, that is, the productive practice is such that a leads to b; or the implementation of a in ideal circumstances leads to b1, b2, b3 and so on. And there is a rationale (ethical, practical and consequential) for the productive practice and for its implementation. The second element of our change model is giving an account of how the current system into which the new productive practice is to be implemented works. This means that the investigator/implementer needs to identify and evaluate: how the system currently works, current arrangements of people and resources, current allocations of people to functions and roles and current outputs from the system. The third element refers to the new site of practice or the implementation site. In the first instance an account needs to be provided, which specifies: the arrangements of resources in the new productive practice; likely changes to the arrangement of resources as a result of implementing the productive practice; possible arrangements of people to functions and roles in the new productive practice; likely changes to allocations of people to functions and roles as a result of implementing the productive practice; the desired rate of change; the intended effects of implementing the productive practice, that is, planned consequences and possible unintended effects of implementing the productive practice (these are speculations about what might happen and they refer to unplanned effects); and strategies for minimizing unintended effects if they occur.

174

Interventions in Education Systems

Capacity development, central to the implementation of the productive practice, is a learning process. This means that there is a need to specify: the circumstances in which learning can take place in the specific learning environment; the resources and technologies needed to allow that learning to take place; the type of relationship between teacher and student, and student and student, to effect that learning; a theory of learning, that is, how can that construct (i.e. knowledge set, skill or disposition) be assimilated; a theory of transfer held by the teacher, that is, how can the learning which has taken place in a particular set of circumstances (i.e. a classroom in a university, with a set of students in a particular way, with a particular theory of learning underpinning it and so forth) transfer to other environments in other places and times; an appropriate fit between learning outcomes and learning approaches; and appropriate theory-to-practice, practice-to-theory, and practice-to-theoryto-practice, relations in the learning programme. There is also a need to put in place appropriate resources to allow that capacity to be realized. Capacity needs to relate appropriately to new arrangements and amounts of resources, and to new allocations of persons to functions and roles. The reason for this is that developing and realizing human capacity has two elements: what is learnt, that is, knowledge sets, skills and dispositions; and, just as importantly, arrangements of resources which allow such knowledge sets, skills and dispositions to be realized. The fourth and final stage is the institutionalizing and sustainability process. It is important, in the first instance, to evaluate formatively the implementation of the productive practice to allow continuous monitoring of the initiative. Evaluative practices can be regarded as formative if evidence is gathered relating to the programme of activity being evaluated, that evidence is elicited, interpreted and used by the practitioner, the policymaker or an interested party, and such evidence is used by them with the specific intention of deciding on the subsequent steps in the development of the productive practice. The productive practice is in a constant state of change and development. The longevity and sustainability of the new productive practice in situ, and as it is being implemented, depends on resource arrangements, allocations of particular people to positions of responsibility, particular roles and arrangements of power and authority, the capacity of key people in the system, policy discourses and new policies. We have been aware in the writing of this book how complex education systems are, and indeed, whether we should even be using the term in the first

Conclusions: How Education Systems Work

175

place. And this of course applies to both how we have described these educational institutions and the relations between them, and even more fundamentally, how they have changed. We have examined closely four such systems and developed frameworks and schema for exploring how they work, how they change and how they could work in the future.

Notes Introduction: Education Reforms 1 Talcott Parsons (1964) propounded in his early work a theory of structural functionalism, though he argued in his later work that this is only one historically specific manifestation of society. A functionalist perspective prioritizes structure over agency or action. Society is seen as a functional whole, with relations between its various parts or elements providing the necessary connections. Social consensus, order and integration are understood as key beliefs in structural-functionalism. For Parsons, any social system has four prerequisites: adaptation, goal attainment, integration and pattern maintenance. Wallerstein (1984) developed a phased or stage theory of history. For example, the capitalist world system could be divided into four phases. The first and second phases comprised processes of bureaucratization, homogenization of the population, expansion of the militia, regal absolutism, the diversification of economic activity and the development of a small bourgeois class. The third and fourth phases comprised the exploitation of new markets, the development of competitive world systems, movement from agricultural to industrial capitalism, urbanization and the rise of manufacturing. Other phases of capitalism related to freeing up labour markets and capital flows. Raymond Boudon (1984) developed an interestingly more subtle concept of social structures than Weber’s coarse concept of ideal types and regarded these structures as almost impervious to change; thus he came to his pessimistic conclusion that for inequality of educational opportunity to be reduced either society should be unstratified or the system of education should be undifferentiated, both of which he saw as unfeasible. He called his stance epistemological realism and abjured any form of analysis that involved history and psychology. Archer (2013) in opposition to theories of upward conflation of structure and agency, downward conflation of these two and their central conflation, argues for a process of analytical dualism. Structure and agency are analysed separately in time and change is understood as either morphogenetic or morphostatic. 2 Basil Bernstein (1971, 1973, 1975, 1990) wrote extensively on a number of related issues, but principally his work focused on three key areas: language and social class, the construction of the curriculum and knowledge development. For Bernstein, sociologists of education foregrounded the contents of the curriculum

178

Notes

and attempted to build theories which explain how power relations are relayed externally through the formal mechanisms of education; for example, how social class relations persist across generations. In contrast, his major concern has been the internal or intrinsic features of pedagogic discourse that structure the content of the curriculum and how it is differentially distributed between different social groups. Knowledge or indeed different types of knowledge are therefore not relayed in an unmediated fashion from the external world to the internal environment of the school and thence to the students, but are recontextualized in terms of the way students pedagogically access them. The focus is therefore on the pedagogic device, rather than the contents of the curriculum per se; and this pedagogic device works according to distribution, recontextualization and evaluation rules. These rules are constructed in terms of the strength of the boundaries between different organizing ideas (cf. Scott 2008). 3 Hirschman (1970) argued that there are two ways in which consumers, or in the field that we are dealing with here, parents, can influence an organization. First, there is exit, in which the consumer withdraws from the exchange, or in relation to schools, the child is moved from one school to another. Second, there is voice, in which the consumer continues to trade with the organization, but seeks to influence the terms of this trade or what it is that is being traded. In relation to schools, parents allow their child to remain at the school, but by various means seek to influence and improve the education of their child. 4 Émile Durkheim [1895] (1982) suggests that the division of labour, a historical phenomenon, is beneficial to society because it creates a sense of solidarity between people. It does this in two ways: mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. With mechanical solidarity, there are no intervening structures and people between the individual and society. Society is organized on a collective basis and belief systems are shared. With organic solidarity society is organized into a system of different functions, with individuals defined by a sense of possessive individualism. 5 Governments round the world at the end of the twentieth century and in the early part of the twenty-first century, with a few notable exceptions such as Finland, have reached a settlement about the nature of the school curriculum, learning approaches and assessment practices. This consensus now operates at all levels of the education system and can be expressed in terms of a number of propositions: traditional knowledge forms and strong insulations between them need to be preserved; each of these knowledge forms can be expressed in terms of lower and higher level domains and the latter have to be taught before the former and sequenced correctly; certain groups of children are better able to access the curriculum than other children, and thus a differentiated curriculum is necessary to meet the needs of all school learners; the teacher’s role is to impart this body of knowledge in the most efficient and effective way, and thus their brief cannot concern itself with the ends to which

Notes

6

7

8 9

179

education is directed, but only the means for its efficient delivery; and the school’s role is to deliver a public service that meets the targets set for it by governments. Singapore is no exception. Bablawi and Luciani (1987) suggest that a rentier state has four characteristics: (i) rent situations predominate, (ii) a society relies on an external rent rather than income from a strong domestic sector, (iii) only a small part of the population are engaged in activities involving the generation of the rent and (iv) the government is the principal recipient of the external rent. Sahlburg (2011a) suggests that ‘Teacher education is now research-based, meaning that it must be supported by scientific knowledge and focus on thinking processes and cognitive skills used in conducting research’ (Jakku-Sihvonen and Niemi 2006). ENLACE was the annual multiple-choice examination taken by all the children in schools in Mexico. The most recent administration (2012–18) has just abolished it. Educational judgements are complicated matters and though evidence-based may still be in dispute. Kelly (2006: 14) suggests that ‘two individuals of impeccable rationality might radically disagree about the bearing of a particular piece of evidence E on a given hypothesis H. Even in such cases, the disputants are not wholly without common ground. For they at least agree about the characterization of the evidence E: their disagreement concerns rather the probative force of E with respect to H. An even more radical challenge to the capacity of evidence to serve as neutral arbiter among rival theories concerns the alleged theory-ladenness of observation. According to proponents of the doctrine of theory-ladenness, in cases of fundamental theoretical dispute, there will typically be no theoretically neutral characterization of the evidence available. Rather, adherents of rival theories will irremediably differ as to the appropriate description of the data itself.’

Chapter 1: Implementation Myopia 1 In a recent review of the Mexican Education System for the OECD, Hopkins et al. (2008) made the following recommendations: (i) establish a compelling moral purpose for the reform of the Mexican educational system; (ii) establish clarity about the standards expected in key areas such as literacy, numeracy and science/ technology, required for students at various levels in the system; (iii) align the curriculum to these key areas and produce high-quality and practical materials to support the work of teachers; (iv) develop assessment approaches around the standards to provide regular diagnostic information for formative assessment and monitoring; (v) invest heavily in teacher quality; (vi) move quickly to improve the quality of leadership at school and system level; (vii) increase autonomy at key levels within the system (state, regional and school), but maintain strong national

180

2

3

4

5

6

7

Notes

frameworks; (viii) intervene positively in those schools and areas that have the greatest difficulties in maintaining high educational standards and support students most at risk; (ix) review the organization of schooling in Mexico in light of the principles being espoused for the reform of the Bachillerato; (x) take immediate steps to expand teacher supply in Mexico; (xi) review the balance of funding of education; and (xii) build a guiding coalition among the key stakeholders in education in Mexico. Talcott Parsons (1964) is a classical example of a structural-functionalist. Parts of a system contribute to the operation or functioning of the whole system. The parts work together in an orderly fashion, and are in either equilibrium or are moving towards equilibrium. Change is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. The roles taken on by people in society and the institutions to which they belong are interdependent. If one changes, the other also changes. There is, in short, consensus within the social system and individual behaviour is governed by agreed norms and values. Robert Merton [1949] (1968), though a structural-functionalist, located most of his work at the meso- rather than the meta-level of social analysis. His middle-range theories engaged with ideas such as the unintended consequences of actions, role strain, role model and the self-fulfilling prophecy. A National Curriculum is a common programme of study in schools, which is designed to produce uniformity of content and learning in maintained schools in a country. The distinction between public and private goods is an important one and was first made by Adam Smith ([1776] 1977: 779), who noted the existence of certain products ‘which though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society are, however, of such a nature that the profits could never repay the expenses to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect’. Thus Smith, though an ardent advocate of the market, recognized that it does not solve all of its problems. Moreover, he concluded that because the market fails to provide public goods, government must do so. Karl Marx suggested that ‘(e)ach country has its own ruling class. In capitalist countries, the rulers own the means of production and employ workers. The capitalist class is also called the bourgeoisie. Means of production are what it takes to produce goods. Raw materials, satellite networks, machinery, ships and factories are examples. Workers own nothing but their ability to sell their labor for a wage’ (Marx [1875] 2010: 57). Cf. World Bank (2003), Case Study 3 – El Salvador: Participation in Macroeconomic Policy Making and Reform, Washington, DC.

Notes

181

8 An example of this is the World Bank-funded Rural Education and Development (READ) Project (2014) (begun in 2006). Its aim is to enhance the quality of education in rural primary school grades one through to five. It has three components. The first is ‘(s)upport for rural schools by increasing the amount of learning materials available to students and teachers. Teachers and their school networks are supported in the use of learning materials. Classroom libraries are also being established and reading is promoted through professional development, professional teacher networks, and a public reading campaign.’ The second is ‘(t)he government’s capacity to monitor student learning through participation in national and international assessments is being strengthened. The efficiency of education policy tools is also being improved.’ And the third is ‘(f)inancial and technical support are being provided for project management and the monitoring of projects.’

Chapter 2: Internal Changes and the Workings of Education Systems 1 If information is collected about individuals in the system and then used to make judgements about schools, districts, states or nation states, then there are two possibilities. The first of these is a league table based on raw scores (student scores are aggregated to allow comparative judgements to be made about schools, districts, states or nation states). The second is a league table based on value-added scores. Value-added data analysis mathematically models the input of particular institutions or systems, such as schools, on the development of individuals that belong to those institutions or systems. There are three current meanings given to the term. The first of these is a measure of progress made by the individual where the prior attainment of that individual is controlled for. The second is a measure of progress where prior attainment as well as a range of other pupil and school factors outside the control of the school is controlled for. The third is a measure of progress where these background factors are controlled for but no control is exercised over prior attainment. Measurements such as these produce different results if different factors are taken into account. Most acceptable value-added analyses use a form of multi-level modelling, and this involves initial decisions being made about: (a) background factors to be included in the modelling exercise, (b) interaction factors for the model, (c) the levels of hierarchy in the model and (d) the coefficients that it is assumed will be random at each level. Statistical relationships can as a result be calculated for relationships between different variables within the model. As a result of these processes, a value can be attached to the input of the educational institution as it has impacted on the progress of the individual who has attended it. Indeed,

182

Notes

because multi-level modelling is sophisticated enough to operate at different levels within the system, a value can be attached to the input of the unit being judged. Thus the modelling involved requires the researcher to make a number of decisions about which inputs to include and which relations to determine. The accuracy of such modelling depends on the belief that the educational researcher has in the reliability and validity of the data that are used, in the decisions they make about which variables to use in the modelling process, and also in the ability of the researcher to develop appropriate indicators or quasi-properties to reflect the actual properties of individuals and educational institutions and their covariance in real-life settings. Combining student scores (as outcome measures) and process observations in its turn requires the development of a methodology or to put it another way a reliable and valid process to make comparative judgements between students, schools, districts, states or nation states. 2 Alma Harris, Tracie Allen and Jane Goodall (2008) in their project RATL and in their report – Capturing Transformation: How Schools secure and sustain improvement (Harris, Allen and Goodall 2008) – make the following recommendations: ‘(i) Schools that sustain transformation see innovation and change as an integral part of their day to day activity; (ii) School to school collaboration and networking is an essential component in sustaining transformation – it provides the infrastructure for new approaches to innovation and change; (iii) Deep cultural change is at the heart of successful and sustainable school transformation; (iv) School cultures that support innovation are “high risk and high trust”; (v) There are key content, process and dynamic levers that schools utilise to secure transformation; (vi) The particular combination of these levers varies according to the school’s stage of development and its context; (vii) Sustaining transformation is unlikely without some external impetus, drive and input and is highly dependent on knowledge transfer between schools; (viii) The RATL programme has provided schools with expertise in school-based innovation which they continue to use to sustain transformation; (ix) Data and self evaluation are at the heart of sustaining transformation; the use of data provides a powerful basis for ongoing review and change; (x) Leadership in schools that sustain transformation is purposefully distributed; (xi) Sustainable transformation requires the active and purposeful abandonment of certain approaches, processes and ways of working that no longer meet the school’s stage of development; and (xii) Schools that sustain transformation learn while innovating – they have feedback systems which allow them to refine and develop processes as change is happening.’ 3 Viviane Robinson, Margie Hohepa and Claire Lloyd in their project and publication School Leadership and Student Outcomes: Identifying What Works and Why – Best Evidence Synthesis (Robinson, Hohepa and Lloyd 2009: 1) explain that ‘The New Zealand Ministry of Education’s best evidence synthesis iterations draw together,

Notes

183

explain and illustrate through vignette and case, bodies of evidence about what works to improve education outcomes, and what can make a bigger difference for the education of all our children and young people. The BESs are intended to be a catalyst for systemic improvement and sustainable development in education.’ 4 Cf. Luke, Freebody, Shun, and Gopinathan (2010) as an example of their work. 5 Cf. Barone, Berliner, Blanchard, Casanova and McGown (1996); Book (1996); Dinkelman (1997); Foshay (1998); Frabutt, Holter and Nuzzi (2008); Fueyo and Koorland (1997); Hensen (1996); Holter and Frabutt (2011, 2012); Johnson (2012); Kemmis and McTaggart (1988); Marks and Louis (1997); McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead (1996); McTaggart (1997); Mills (2011); Osterman and Kottkamp (1993); Perrett (2003); Schmuck (1997); and Stringer (2008). 6 Teacher Learning Communities or Professional Learning Communities are used here as generic terms to denote meetings between teachers on a regular basis with the specific purposes of review and improvement, and they do not refer to specific manifestations, such as Wiliam (2011) and Stoll et al. (2006).

Chapter 3: A History of International Organizations in Education 1 Maynard Keynes, in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [1936] (2010), in opposition to classical economic theories, suggested that borrowing during a recession is a prerequisite for emerging from that recession in a healthy way. This should be used to stimulate the economy and in particular to increase spending and the spending capacity of the individual. In times of positive GDP growth, governments should be more concerned with imbalances between revenue and spend, and seek to reduce deficits. If demand is reduced in times of negative growth, then this is likely to have detrimental effects on production and employment, and it is then much harder to generate growth. Monetarist economic policy suggest that borrowing at all times should be kept low, that inflation should not be allowed to rise and that the value of the currency should not be artificially stimulated, even if this causes unemployment to rise. 2 One example is Higher Education in California (OECD 1990). 3 The OECD’s International Management in Higher Education programme: ‘has established a permanent forum in which education professionals can exchange experiences and benefit from shared reflection, thought and analysis in order to address the issues that concern them. The Programme’s work has a global reach and includes monitoring and analysing policy-making, gathering data, and sharing new ideas, as well as reflecting on past experience. These activities assist members to contribute to the development of higher education internationally, nationally and

184

Notes

locally. The Programme’s strategic position within the OECD provides members with a recognised international network, drawing together higher education professionals, leaders, policy makers, managers and researchers.’ (Website) 4 This is now the Centre for Effective Learning Environments (CELE). 5 Cf. Andersen and Jordan (1968); Brunner and Meltzer (1993); Cagan (1965); Friedman (1956, 1960, 1968); Friedman [1969] (2005); Friedman and Meiselman (1963); Friedman and Schwartz (1963a,b); and Schwartz (1987). 6 Cf. Scott, D. (2011) ‘PISA, International Comparisons, Epistemic Paradoxes’, in M. Pereyra, H-G. Kottoff and R. Cowen (eds), PISA under Examination: Changing Knowledge, Changing Tests and Changing Schools. SENSE.

Chapter 4: Corporative Change in Mexico 1 The purposes of this research project were to identify a set of standards in literacy, numeracy and science/technology that fits with the curriculum requirements at four key stages of the Mexican system of basic education; develop systems and procedures for ensuring the implementation and sustainability of the standards mechanisms; and contribute to more effective schooling and a better trained and educated workforce in Mexico. This research and development project did not include a national testing process; however, built into the project were pre- and post-development consultative processes with key national and local stakeholders and a pilot in 34 schools in 11 Mexican States. The principal aim was to develop standards for four key points in the educational careers of pupils: the third year of pre-school, the third year of primary school (approximately 8–9 years old), the sixth year of primary school (approximately 11–12 years old) and the third year of secondary schools (approximately 14–15 years old). A secondary aim was to develop implementation and sustainability mechanisms for these standards.   The two strands of the project, curriculum standards and an implementation framework, are intertwined, both methodologically and conceptually, and for the purposes of this project were treated as such. Creating a new set of curriculum standards in literacy, numeracy and science/technology involved the following: (i) consulting with all the relevant stakeholders in Mexico about educational aims and purposes; interrogating research bases to determine the characteristics of highquality standards development and the infrastructure for its implementation and sustainability; identifying and taking account of the contexts of implementation and sustainability, both nationally and locally in Mexico; agreeing the relevant aims and objectives, curriculum standards and implementation mechanisms with all relevant educational stakeholders before use. Though the report concluded that all these initiatives should be implemented, this project, in line with the response to

Notes

185

it by the Mexican Education Ministry, focused on the development of curriculum standards in literacy, numeracy and science/technology, and the means for their implementation.   The project therefore developed through various data collection processes a means for local and school implementation, which had the following purposes: (i) the authentic delivery of the standard at classroom level; (ii) choice of the most effective and appropriate means of delivery; (iii) an implementation strategy, which most effectively fits with national and regional educational policies and aspirations; and (iv) an implementation strategy, which is best suited to the sustainability of the three sets of curriculum standards. The implementation and sustainability strategy was developed by examining and working with the following stakeholders and support structures: teachers and school principals, advisory services (ATPs and other subject and pedagogic advisory services), school inspectors, parents and state authorities.   This was a phased research and development project, placed within a consultative framework. The project attempted to provide answers to the following questions: What are appropriate standards in literacy, numeracy and science/technology at different age and ability levels for Mexico? What are appropriate contents, progressions, skills/dispositions, and formative and summative assessment arrangements in the domains of literacy, numeracy and science/technology, for the Mexican Education System? Which external and internal school arrangements are best suited for their implementation? What is the most appropriate way to sustain these reforms (new curriculum standards in literacy, numeracy and science/ technology, and the arrangements for their implementation and use)?   In order to do this, four phases of project development were planned and carried out. The first involved the collection of data about the Mexican Education System, as it currently operates, and the collection of evidence from around the world about standards and their implementation. The second comprised a series of consultations with key stakeholders at national, local and school levels about the development of standards and the means for their implementation. The third comprised the development of curriculum standards in the three chosen subjects and the infrastructure to support them. Finally, a pilot project was conducted in the case study schools with the intention of developing the most effective means for implementation of the standards mechanisms.   During the first phase, a literature search was undertaken by project team members, and this had three purposes: (i) to identify models of good practice for both strands: standards and implementation, in relation to other countries in the world; (ii) to better understand national and local contexts in Mexico; (iii) to identify existing standards development in Mexico in the three chosen subject areas, and other relevant curriculum development at basic and secondary school levels.

186

Notes

  The second phase was the consultation stage, and it involved individual and group interviews with key stakeholders at national and local levels. This data collection activity was undertaken by a team in Mexico. Relevant stakeholders included: national ministry officials with a school curriculum remit, national trade union officials with a school curriculum remit, regional ministry officials with a school curriculum remit, regional trade union officials with a school curriculum remit, representatives from parent bodies, outside academic educational experts, confederation of business leaders and headteachers and teachers (literacy, numeracy and science/technology) in the case study schools.   The aim of the third phase was to develop standards for four key points in the educational careers of pupils. It involved the collation and analysis of data collected in phases one and two, for the purposes of designing curriculum standards in literacy, numeracy and science/technology at these levels, and the most appropriate means for implementing them in schools. The fourth phase consisted of a pilot conducted in the case study schools with the intention of testing out the implementation of the standards in relation to six teaching and learning mechanisms that, we suggest, could support the use of curriculum standards in the Basic Education System in Mexico.   The six mechanisms we focused on were (i) developing a standards document for parents; (ii) planning a sequence of lessons; (iii) goal-orientated teaching – Beginnings, Middles and Conclusions; (iv) scaffolding in teaching; (v) individual student progression; and (vi) organizing a curriculum within a school. The word ‘mechanism’ is used here to refer to a teaching and learning practice which configures a set of activities in a particular order, leading to learning taking place.   The pilot intervention consisted of five components: introductory workshops, weekly teacher learning community meetings, collegial classroom observations with feedback, website conferences and various types of support mechanisms. The workshops in the pilot schools introduced teachers and headteachers to the key strategies and approaches underpinning the newly developed standards and showed how they could be incorporated into their teaching. The teachers were presented with a number of very specific teaching techniques that might be used at classroom and school levels. A particularly important feature of the model developed is action planning by teachers. These workshops took place (i) prior to the second semester, (ii) in the middle of the second semester and (iii) at the end of the second semester. These meetings were conducted by the Mexican curriculum team and supported by the London curriculum team.   The introductory workshops provided the teachers with ideas for the kinds of changes that they might have wanted to effect in their practice, but it is our experience (supported by the research on teacher professional development) that these changes come about only through sustained support, such as can be provided

Notes

187

through TLCs. While the TLCs were inaugurated during the introductory workshop, they only became ‘real’ in the weekly meetings, as teachers met together to discuss their experiences to date. In addition to providing support to the participating teachers, these meetings also acted as a regular spur to the teachers to implement their action plans.   The third component of the professional development was classroom observations, though for the present project this was used sparingly. These observations were undertaken by the Mexican curriculum coordinators in the schools. The distinctive feature of these classroom observations is that the agenda for these observations – what the observer is looking for – will be determined by the teacher being observed, with reference to his or her action plan. We are aware that requiring the observer to follow the agenda set by the teacher being observed is a break from much supervisory practice, and even from many coaching models, so an important task for the introductory workshops was to prepare protocols for the classroom observations, as well as training in their use so that the observations could generate usable formative feedback to teachers. This clear focus serves also to distance these observations from those undertaken for the purposes of teacher accountability and performance management, and in our experience, makes the observations acceptable to teachers.   Internet conferencing acted to supplement the face-to-face in-service teacher training by the Mexican curriculum coordinators and was facilitated by the London coordinators. An e-learning platform allows a significant economization of resources. Parallel to face-to-face teacher development delivered by the curriculum coordinator, the blended learning component helps to continue and deepen the learning in a centralized way, and complements the work of the face-to-face training. However, not all the schools in the pilot had internet access on a regular basis and not all the teachers were able to use this modality confidently.   Support mechanisms for the implementation/development/evaluation took two forms: (i) support for the teachers in the pilot schools from the Mexican curriculum coordinators (i.e. developing strategies and pedagogies for implementing the standards, developing materials for the implementation of the standards, lesson feedback from the observations, leading the teacher learning communities, etc.); (ii) support for the teachers in the pilot schools from the London curriculum coordinators (i.e. facilitating the web-based conferences, etc.). These various forms of support are essential for the two elements of the project: standards development and standards implementation.   Data analysis took place throughout the project through progressive focusing, identifying new themes and refining the research questions. Development of theoretical categories and models was determined by pre-focusing on the area of study, by theoretical schema already developed in the area, and, more particularly,

188

Notes

by engagement with the data themselves. Data from each phase were analysed separately as well as across phases, in which themes and issues were compared and contrasted to draw out underlying patterns and common findings. Ethical procedures were developed and implemented, with appropriate institutional approval, at different phases of the project. 2 Another example is the In-Service Training Project in Mexico. In 2003 the in-service training department of the Ministry developed an innovative programme for marshalling the untapped potential of educational advisers, linking them to two state universities through a training programme that would equip them to play an important role in improving the curriculum, pedagogy and, above all, encouraging the school to be a catalyst for community development. It was quickly discovered that these advisers never had their roles defined properly, that the Curriculum Undersecretariat had no reliable statistics about how many advisers were on the books, what their level was and what functions they were performing. It took a full year to discover who these people were. A few advisers had doctorates; however, the majority had had no training beyond a school-leaving certificate. Many were on near permanent leave and others were involved in activities that had little to do with education. Local authorities were less than anxious to have the advisers trained and often there were overlapping institutions that were supposedly providing training programmes but these existed only on paper. What the advisers had in common was that they were appointed by the strongest stakeholding organizations and were never trained or evaluated by any institution. In the case of the in-service training programme for schools and subject advisers the selection of participants was changed from one based on merit to one based on clientelistic requirements, preventing the programme from having any real impact.

Chapter 5: Experiments and Interventions in the English Education System 1 Cf. McCulloch (2011). 2 City Technology Colleges were created by the Conservative government in the late 1990s. They are state-funded all-ability secondary schools that are independent of local education authorities. Fifteen were created; however, by 2014, only three still existed, the rest having been converted into academies. 3 Grant Maintained Schools were state schools that opted out of local education authorities between 1988 and 1998. Some of these schools were selective. 4 Academy schools are state-funded schools in England, directly funded from the central government, but independent of local authority control. Most of these are

Notes

5

6 7 8

189

secondary schools; however, some are primaries. Academy schools now specialize in a curriculum subject, such as physical education, and come under the Specialist School Programme. Free Schools, set up under the coalition government of 2010–15 in England, are financed separately from all other types of state schools and do not have to follow the national curriculum. Cf. Bottery (1997); Bottery and Wright (2000); Etzioni (1969); Freidson (2001); Hanlon (1998); Saks (1995); Troman (1996); and Whitty (2001). In 2012 the National College for Leadership was renamed the National College for Leadership and Learning. It was set up to develop leadership training in England. The OFSTED is the national inspection body in England, which has responsibility for schools, colleges, children’s services and teacher training.

Chapter 6: Statism and the Singapore Model 1 The People’s Action Party (PAP) is Singapore’s ruling political party since 1959. In 2011, it won 81 of a possible 87 seats in parliament. 2 The policy of import substitution industrialization is a trade and economic policy which seeks to replace foreign imports with domestic production. 3 The policy of export oriented industrialization is a trade and economic policy which attempts to accelerate the industrialization process by exporting goods to countries in which this gives the exporter a competitive advantage. 4 The Singapore Curriculum Development Institute was set up in the 1980s and has specialized in mathematics and science pedagogy. In mathematics, it has developed the model method, which uses visual methods to represent mathematical quantities and their relationships. 5 Gifted and Talented programmes are now common throughout the world and consist of identifying those children who are considered to be operating beyond the capacity of their peers and providing them with specialized learning arrangements. Some iterations make claims which amount to assertions that some people are more talented than other people and that these capacities are genetically inherited. 6 Allen (1992); Ashton and Sung (1994); Ball (1993); Blackwell and Eilon (1991); Block (1990); Brown, G. (1994); Brown, P. (1990, 1995); Brown and Lauder (1992, 1998); Brown and Scase (1994); Carnoy et al. (1993); Cowling and Sugden (1994); Dewey (1966); Dicken (1992); Eatwell (1995); Esping-Andersen (1994); Freeman (1995); Gramsci (1971); Green and Steedman (1993); Halsey et al. (1980); Harvey (1989); Hirsch (1977); Hirschmann (1986); Jones and Hatcher (1994); Lauder (1987, 1991); Lipietz (1987); Marchak (1991); Michie and Smith (eds) (1995); Murray (1989); Rowthorn (1995); and Toffler (1990).

190

Notes

Chapter 7: Finland’s Education Revolution 1 In the 2012 PISA exercise Finland was placed twelfth in the overall rankings of mathematical literacy with an average score of 519. The difference in performance between the highest (95th percentile) and the lowest (5th percentile) achievers – a measure of educational equity – was 281 points (the OECD average is 302) higher than it has been in the past. About 12 per cent of its students were below level two (functional mathematics equivalent), 15 per cent were at level 5 or 6 (the highest achievers), with OECD averages being 23 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively. Since 2003 there are 8 per cent fewer higher achievers and 6 per cent more lower achievers. Over the last 9 years, mathematics performance in PISA decreased by 25 points. In reading Finland was placed seventh among participants with an average score of 524. The difference in performance between the highest (95th percentile) and lowest (5th percentile) achievers was 309 points (the OECD average was 310). Eleven per cent of its students were below level 2 (functional reading equivalent), 14 per cent were at level 5 or 6 (the highest achievers), with OECD averages being 18 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively. Since 2000 there have been 5 per cent fewer higher achievers and 4 per cent more lower achievers. Reading performance decreased between 2000 and 2012 by 22 points. In science Finland was placed fifth among participants with an average score of 545. The difference in performance between the highest (95th percentile) and the lowest (5th percentile) achievers was 306 points (the OECD average was 304). Eight per cent of its students were below level 2 (functional science equivalent), 17 per cent were at level 5 or 6 (highest achievers), with OECD averages being 18 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively. Since 2006 there has been 4 per cent fewer higher achievers and 4 per cent more lower achievers. Science performance decreased between 2006 and 2012 by 18 points (OECD 2012, 2013).   All in all Finland has performed less well than in the past even if one makes allowances for the assessment-driven systems of a group of Asian countries, and there has been a widening of the gap between the best and worst performing percentiles. As of yet no official explanation has been offered although the hypotheses offered by Simola et al. (2002: 260) some time ago that the system of devolution of responsibility itself could well begin to increase social exclusion ought to be investigated. More recently, Finland has taken part in two other international examinations. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) for the first time in 2011 (PIRLS 2011). Overall, Finland was placed joint 4 out of 45 countries in 4th grade reading on the 2011 PIRLS tests with an average score of 568. Eighteen per cent of its students reached the advanced international benchmark of 625 (99 per cent reached the low international benchmark of 400). Participants did as well on informational, as well as on literary, reading. The TIMSS for the first

Notes

191

time in 2011 (TIMMS 2012). Finland was placed joint 9th in 4th grade mathematics among 57 participating jurisdictions with a score of 545. Twelve per cent of its students reached the advanced international benchmark of 625 (98 per cent reached the low international benchmark of 400). The international median was 4 per cent and 90 per cent, respectively. Finland was placed 15th in 8th grade mathematics among 56 participating jurisdictions with a score of 514. Four per cent of its students reached the advanced international benchmark of 625 (96 per cent reached the low international benchmark of 400). The international median was 3 per cent and 75 per cent, respectively. Finland was placed 3rd in 4th grade science among 57 participating jurisdictions with a score of 570. Twenty per cent of its students reached the advanced international benchmark of 625 (99 per cent reached the low international benchmark of 400). The international median was 5 per cent and 92 per cent, respectively. Finland was also placed 7th in 8th grade science among 56 participating jurisdictions with a score of 552. Thirteen per cent of its students reached the advanced international benchmark of 625 (99 per cent reached the low international benchmark of 400). The international median was 4 per cent and 79 per cent, respectively. 2 The FNBE issues curriculum frameworks that schools need to take account of when they create their own, complementary, curricula. The subjects that students must study are as follows: (1) pre-primary education: language and interaction, mathematics, ethics and philosophy, nature and the environment, health, physical and motor development, and art and culture, (2) basic education (comprehensive schools to year nine): values and underlying principles; general education and teaching objectives; and language programme; depictions of operational culture, learning environment and working approach; possible instructional emphases, language immersion, or foreign-language instruction; possible integration of instruction; implementation of cross-curricular themes; educational objectives and content in different subjects by year group, or, in instruction of mixed groups, by study modules; instruction in optional subject subjects; objectives for pupil behaviour; cooperation with pre-primary education and other basic education; cooperation between home and school; cooperation with other parties; pupil welfare plan and organization of related cooperation; principles of curriculum formulation; guidance and counselling activities as a support for studies, and arrangements for an introduction to working life; organization of club activities; provision of remedial education; instructions of pupils requiring special support; instructions of pupils belonging to different language and cultural groups; pupil assessments based on descriptions of good performance and criteria for final assessment; principles of academic progress; certificates and reports; information strategy; and evaluation of activity and ongoing development (FNBE 2004). Subjects include mother tongue and literature; the other national language; foreign languages, mathematics; biology

192

Notes

and geography; environmental studies; physics and chemistry; health education; religion and ethics; history and social studies, music, visual arts, craft, psychical education, home economics, optional subjects decided locally by schools. The renewed core curriculum will be completed by the end of 2014. New local curricula that are based on this core curriculum should be prepared by the beginning of school year 2016–17 (FNBE 2014). (3) At upper secondary level (years 10–12) (FNBE 2004: 9) upper secondary schools must create programme documents that contain the following: mission statement and value priorities; main characteristics of the operational culture, the study environment and working methods; counselling and guidance plan; integration and cross-curricular themes; distribution of lesson hours; language programme; objectives and core contents by subject and course; principles of independent study; information strategy; co-operation with students’ parents or guardians; co-operation with vocational institutions and other upper secondary schools; co-operation with other educational institutions and bodies; education for students in need of special support; education for language and cultural groups; student welfare services; assessment of students’ learning; and continuous development and evaluation of operations. The curriculum must include descriptions of all courses. The objectives and core contents of applied courses must also be determined within the curriculum. In cases where the upper secondary school provides foreign-language education, distance learning or an opportunity to complete general upper secondary school diplomas in art and physical education, this must be specified within the curriculum. The subjects at upper secondary are mother tongue and literature; the other national language; foreign languages; studies in mathematics and natural sciences; studies in the humanities and social sciences; religion or ethics; physical and health education; arts and practical subjects. 3 According to (FNBE 2004: 8), ‘The curricular system of general upper secondary education comprises the following parts: the General Upper Secondary Schools Act (629/1998) and Decree (810/1998); the Government Decree on the General National Objectives and Distribution of lesson hours in General Upper Secondary Education (955/2002); the Regulation of the Finnish National Board of Education on the National Core Curriculum for General Upper Secondary Education (33/011/2003); the local curriculum approved by the education provider; the annual plan in accordance with Section 3 of the Upper Secondary Schools Decree (810/1998).’

References Aguayo, S. (2008), The Mexican Almanac. Mexico City: Quezado. Aho, E., Pitkänen, K. and Sahlberg, P. (2006), Policy Development and Reform Principles of Basic and Secondary Education in Finland since 1968. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Ainley, J. (2004), Evaluation Report of the New Basics Research Program. Canberra: Australian Council for Educational Research, July. Alba, R., Sloan, J. and Sperling, J. (2011), ‘The Integration Imperative: The Children of Low- Status Immigrants in the Schools of Wealthy Societies’. Annual Review of Sociology, 37, 1: 395–415. Allen, J. (1992), ‘Post-Industrialism and Post-Fordism’, in S. Hall, T. McGrew and D. Held (eds), Modernity and Its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Alton-Lee, A. (2004), Using Best Evidence Syntheses to Assist in Making a Bigger Difference for Diverse Learners. Wellington: Ministry of Education. —(2008), Designing and Supporting Teacher Professional Development to Improve Valued Student Outcomes. Paper presented at the Education of Teachers Symposium at the General Assembly of the International Academy of Education, Limassol, Cyprus, 26 September. Andersen, L. and Jordan, J. (1968), ‘Monetary and Fiscal Actions: A Test of Their Relative Importance in Economic Stabilization’. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 50 (November): 11–24. Antonopoulou, K., Koutrouba, K. and Babalis, T. (2011), ‘Parental Involvement in Secondary Education Schools: The Views of Parents in Greece’. Educational Studies, 37, 3: 333–44. Apple, M. (2006), ‘Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture’. Critical Quarterly, 47, 1–2: 11–29. Archer, M. (2013), Social Origins of Educational Systems (2nd edn). London: Routledge. Arnal, S. and Burwood, S. (2003), ‘Tacit Knowledge and Public Accounts’. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37, 3: 377–91. Ashton, D. N. and Sung, J. (1994), The State, Economic Development and Skill Formation: A New Asian Model. Working Paper No. 3, Leicester: Centre for Labour Market Studies, University of Leicester. Bablawi, H. and Luciani, G. (1987), The Rentier State (Nation, State and Integration in the Arab World). London: Croom Helm and the Instituto Affari Internazional.

194

References

Ball, S. (1993), ‘Education Markets, Choice and Social Class: The Market as a Class Strategy in the UK and the USA’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 14, 1: 3–19. —(1994), Education Reform: A Critical and Post-Structural Approach. Buckingham: Open University Press. —(1997), ‘Policy Sociology and Critical Social Research: A Personal Review of Recent Education Policy and Policy Research’. British Educational Research Journal, 23, 3: 257–74. —(2007), Education Plc: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education. London: Routledge. —(2008), The Education Debate. Bristol: Policy Press. —(2010), ‘New Voices, New Knowledges and the New Politics of Educational Research: The Gathering of a Perfect Storm’. European Educational Research Journal, 9, 3: 124–37. Barber, M. and Mourshed, M. (2009), Shaping the Future: How Good Education Systems Can Become Great in the Decade Ahead. Report on the International Education Roundtable, Singapore, 7 July. Barnard, W. (2004), ‘Parent Involvement in Elementary School and Educational Attainment’. Children and Youth Services Review, 26: 39–62. Barone, T., Berliner, D., Blanchard, J., Casanova, U. and McGown, T. (1996), ‘A Future for Teacher Education: Developing a Strong Sense of Professionalism’, in J. Sikula (ed.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (4th edn). New York: Macmillan, pp. 1108–49. Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (1996), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. London: UCL Press. Barthes (1975), S/Z. London: Jonathon Cape. Basave, A. (2010), Mexicanidad y Esquizofrenia: Los Dos Rostros del MexiJano. Mexico, DF: Editorial Océano de México. Benjamin, L. (1993), Interpersonal Diagnosis and Treatment of Personality Disorders. New York: Guilford Press. Berger, E. and Riojas-Cortez, M. (2012), Parents as Partners in Education: Families and Schools Working Together. London: Pearson. Bernstein, B. (1971), Class, Code and Control: Volume 1 – Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. London and New York: Routledge. —(1973), Class, Code and Control: Volume 2 – Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. London and New York: Routledge. —(1975/1977), Class, Code and Control: Volume 3 – Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions (2nd edn). London and New York: Routledge. —(1990), Class, Code and Control: Volume 4 – The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London and New York: Routledge. —(1998), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research and Critique. London and New York: Routledge.

References

195

Bishop, R., O’Sullivan, D. and Berryman, M. (2010), Scaling Up Education Reform: Addressing the Politics of Disparity. Wellington: NZCER Press. Blackwell, B. and Eilon, S. (1991), The Global Challenge of Innovation. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Block, F. (1990), Post-Industrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press. Booth, C. (1902), Life and Labour of the People in London (3rd edn), 17 vols. London: RareBooksClub.com. Borko, H. (2004), ‘Professional Development and Teacher Learning: Mapping the Terrain’. Educational Researcher, 33, 8: 32. Bottery, M. (1992), The Ethics of Educational Management: Personal, Social and Political Perspectives on School Organisation. London: Cassell. —(1997), ‘Teacher Professionalism through Action Research – Possibility or Pipe Dream’. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 29, 1: 273–92. Bottery, M. and Wright, N. (2000), Teachers and the State: Towards a Directed Profession. London and New York: Routledge. Boudon, R. (1984), La Place du Désordre: Critique des Theories du Changement Social. Paris: PUF. Bourdieu, P. (2005), ‘The Political Field, the Social Field, and the Journalistic Field’, in R. Benson and E. Neveu (eds), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 29–46. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J-C. (1977), Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications. Bracey, G. (2004), ‘International Comparisons: Less than Meets the Eye’. Phi Delta Kappan, 85, 6: 477–8. —(2009), ‘PISA: Not Leaning Hard on the US Economy’. Phi Delta Kappan, 90, 6: 450–1. Bracho, T. and Zamudio, A. (1997), ‘El Gasto Privado en Educacion: Mexico’. Revista Mexicana de Investigacion Educativa, 2, 4: 323–47. Brandon, R., Higgins, K., Pierce, T., Tandy, R. and Sileo, N. (2010), ‘An Exploration of the Alienation Experienced by African American Parents From Their Children’s Educational Environment’. Remedial and Special Education, 31, 3: 208–22. Braudel, F. (2002), Memory and the Mediterranean. Berlin: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Brousseau (1997), Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics: Didactique des Mathématiques, 1970-1990. The Hague: Springer. Brown, G. (1994), ‘The Politics of Potential: A New Agenda for Labour’, in D. Milliband (ed.), Reinventing the Left. Cambridge: Polity. Brown, M. (1992), ‘Elaborate Nonsense? The Muddled Tale of Standard Assessment Tasks in Mathematics at Key Stage 3’, in C. Gipps (ed.), Developing Assessment for the National Curriculum. London: University of London, Institute of Education.

196

References

Brown, P. (1990), ‘The “Third Wave”: Education and the Ideology of Parentocracy’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11: 65–85. —(1995), ‘Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: Some Observations on Recent Trends in Education, Employment and the Labour Market!’. Work Employment and Society, 9, 1: 29–51. Brown, P. and Lauder, H. (1992), ‘Education, Economy and Society: An Introduction to a New Agenda’, in P. Brown and H. Lauder (eds), Education for Economic Survival: From Fordism to Post-Fordism? London: Routledge. —(1998), Capitalism and Social Progress: The Future of Society in a Global Economy. London: Palgrave. —(2006), ‘Education, Globalisation and Economic Development’. Journal of Education Policy, 11, 1: 1–25. Brown, P. and Scase, R. (1994), Higher Education and Corporate Realities. London: UCL Press. Brunner, K. and Meltzer, A. (1993), Money and the Economy: Issues in Monetary Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrawoy, M. (2009), The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Cagan, P. (1965), Determinants and Effects of Changes in the Stock of Money, 1875–1960. NBER, foreword by Milton Friedman, pp. xiii–xxviii. Canadian Council for Learning (2011), What is the Future of Learning in Canada. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Council for Learning. Carayannis, E. G. and Ziemnowicz, C. (eds) (2007), Rediscovering Schumpeter. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Carnoy, M., Castells, M., Cohen, S. and Cardoso, F. H. (1993), The Global Economy in the Information Age. Pennsylvania: Penn State University. Carroll, P. and Kellow, A. (2011), The OECD: A Study of Organisational Adaptation. London: Edward Elgar Publishing. Chaynov, A. V. [1924] (1967), Ocherki po economike trudovogo sel’skogo uezdo, reprinted in A. Cajanov (1967), Oeuvres Choisis, vols I–VIII. Paris and the Hague. Clarke, K. (1991), cited in Department of Education and Science Bulletin, 362/91. London: DES. Coburn, C. and Stein, M. (2010), ‘Reframing the Problem of Research and Practice’, in C. Coburn and M. Stein (eds), Research and Practice in Education: Building Alliances, Bridging the Divide. Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 1–17. Coe, R. and Tymms, P. (2008), ‘Summary of Research on Changes in Educational Standards in the UK’, in M. Harris (ed.), Education Briefing Book 2008: IoD Policy Paper. London: Institute of Directors, August 2008. Comte, A. [1856] (2009), A General View of Positivism, ed. J. Bridges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosío Villegas, D. (1972), El Sistema Politico del Mexico Moderno. Mexico City: Direcho.

References

197

Cowen, M. and Shenton, R. (2003), Doctrines of Development. London: Routledge. Cowling, K. and Sugden, R. (1994), Beyond Capitalism: Towards a New World Economic Order. London: Pinter. Darling-Hammond, L. (1997), The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. —(2008), Powerful Learning: What we know about Teaching for Understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. —(2009), ‘Steady Work: How Finland is Building a Strong Teaching and Learning System’, in L. Darling-Hammond (ed.), The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity will determine our Future. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Darling-Hammond, L. and Rothman, R. (2011), ‘Lessons Learned from Finland, Ontario, and Singapore’, in L. Darling-Hammond and R. Rothman (eds), Teacher and Leader Effectiveness in High-Performing Education Systems. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education and Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Datnow, A., Hubbard, L. and Mehan, H. (1998), Educational Reform Implementation: A Co-Constructed Project. Santa Cruz: Centre for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence. Davis, K. (1945), World Populations in Transit. Washington, DC: American Academy of Social and Political Science. Dearing, E., Kreider, H., Simpkins, S., and Weiss, H. B. (2006), ‘Family Involvement in School and Low-income Children’s Literacy: Longitudinal Associations Between and within Families’. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98: 653–64. Dearing Report (1994), The National Curriculum and its Assessment – A Report. London and York: School Examination and Assessment Council and NCC. Dearing Review (1993), The National Curriculum and its Assessment – A Review. London and York: School Examination and Assessment Council and NCC. Department of Education and Science (DES) (1988a), Task Group on Assessment and Testing: A Report. London: HMSO. —(1988b), Task Group on Assessment and Testing: Supplements. London: HMSO. Dewey, J. (1966), Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press. Dicken, P. (1992), Global Shift: The Internationalisation of Economic Activity. London: Paul Chapman. Dinkelman, T. (1997), ‘The Promise of Action Research for Critically Reflective Teacher Education’. The Teacher Educator, 32, 4: 250–74. Djelic, M-L. and Salhin-Andersson, K. (2006), Transnational Governance: Institutional Dynamics of Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Domina, T. (2005), ‘Levelling the Home Advantage: Assessing the Effectiveness of Parental Involvement in Elementary School’. Sociology of Education, 78: 233–49. Durkheim, E. [1895] (1982), The Rules of Sociological Method, with an introduction by Steven Lucas, translated by W. D. Halls. New York: The Free Press.

198

References

—[1898] (2012), Moral Education. Dover: Courier Dover Publications. Eatwell, J. (1995), ‘The International Origins of Unemployment’, in J. Michie and J. G. Smith (eds), Managing the Global Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edge, K., Tao, S., Riley, K. and Khamsi, K. (2008), ‘Teacher Quality and Parental Participation: An Exploratory Review of Research and Resources Related to Influencing Student Outcomes’. The London Centre for Leadership in Learning. Institute of Education, University of London, p. 59. Engel, G. (2010), ‘The Middle-School Mathematics through Applications Project: Supporting Productive Collaborations during two Different Phases of Curriculum Design’, in M. Coburn and C. Stein (eds), Research and Practice in Education: Building Alliances, Bridging the Divide. Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 19–36. Engels, F. [1845] (1975), ‘The Condition of the Working Class of England’, in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers. Engeström, Y. (2001), ‘Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an Activity Theoretical Reconceptualization’. Journal of Education and Work, 14, 1: 133–56. Epstein, J. (2010), ‘School/Family/Community Partnerships: Caring for the Children We Share’. Phi Delta Kappan, 92, 3: 81–96. Escalante, F. (1998), El Crimen Como Realidad Y Representacion Contribucion Para Una Historia del Presente. Mexico: El Collegio de Mexico. Esping-Andersen, G. (1994), ‘Equity and Work in the Post-industrial Life-cycle!’, in D. Miliband (ed.), Reinventing the Left. Cambridge: Polity. Etzioni, A. (ed.) (1969), The Semi-Professions and their Organization: Teachers, Nurses, Social Workers. London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd. European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education (2012), Development of inclusion – Finland, https://www.european-agency.org/agency-projects/assessmentin-inclusive-settings/assessment-database-of-key-topics/finland. Fan, X. and Chen, M. (2001), ‘Parental Involvement and Students’ Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis’. Educational Psychology Review, 13, 1: 1–22. Febvre, L. (1922), A Geographical Introduction to History, in collaboration with Lionel Bataillon. London: Routledge. Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. (2010), Actor-Network Theory in Education. London and New York: Routledge. Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. and Sawchuk, P. (2010), Emerging Approaches to Educational Research. London and New York: Routledge. Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) (2004a), National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. Online: www.oph.fi/english. —(2004b), National Core Curriculum for Upper Secondary Schools. Online: www.oph.fi/ english. —(2011), Learning and Competence 2020 Strategy of the Finnish National Board of Education. Online: www.oph.fi/english.

References

199

—(2012), Core Curricula and Qualification Requirements. Online: www.oph.fi/english. —(2014), About FNBE: The Finnish National Board of Education. Online: www.oph.fi/ english. Fitzgerald, E. V. K. (2000), ‘State Formation, Democratization, and the Development of Civil Society in Nicaragua’. Latin American Perspectives, 38: 96–100. Foshay, W. R. (1998), Instructional Philosophy and Strategic Direction of the PLATO System. Bloomington, MN: Plato Learning Inc. Foucault, M. (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Freeman, C. (1995), ‘The National System of Innovation in Historical Perspective’. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 19: 5–24. Friedman, M. (1960), A Program for Monetary Stability. New York: Fordham University Press. —(1968), ‘The Role of Monetary Policy’. American Economic Review, 58, 1: 1–17. —[1969] (2005), The Optimum Quantity of Money. London and New York: Transaction Publishers. Friedman, M. (ed.) (1956), Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Friedman, M. and Meiselman, D. (1963), ‘The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897–1958’, in Stabilization Policies. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, pp. 165–268. Friedman, M. and Schwartz, A. (1963a), ‘Money and Business Cycles’. Review of Economics and Statistics, 45, 1, Part 2, Supplement: 32–64. —(1963b), A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Freidson, E. (2001), Professionalism, the Third Logic: On the Practice of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago. Fueyo, V. and Koorland, M. (1997), ‘Teacher as Researcher: A Synonym for Professionalism’. Journal of Teacher Education, 48, 5: 336–44. Fullan, M. (2005), Leadership and Sustainability: Systems Thinkers in Action. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Fullan, M. and Hargreaves, A. (1996), What’s Worth Fighting for in Your School. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Galloway, A. (2008), The Assessment Systems of Finland and Queensland: Policy and New Trends Research Report 1. [Available Online] Geddes, P. (1915), Cities in Evolution. London: Williams and Norgate. Giddens, A. (1994), The Constitution of Society. London: Polity Press. Gill, S. (1992), ‘The Emerging World Order and European Change’, in R. Milliband and L. Panitch (eds), The New World Order: Socialist Register. London: Merlin Press. —(1995), ‘The Global Panopticon: The Neo-Liberal State, Economic Life and Democratic Surveillance’. Alternatives, 20, 1: 1–49. Goh Chok Tong (1997), ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’. Speech by the Prime Minister of Singapore, 2 June, Singapore.

200

References

Goh Chor Boon and Gopinathan, S. (2007), The Development of Education in Singapore since 1965. Singapore: National Institute of Education. Goodson, I. (2007), Professional Knowledge, Professional Lives. Beijeng: Beijeng Normal University. Gough, N. (1999), ‘Globalisation and School Curriculum Change: Locating a Transnational Imaginary’. Journal of Education Policy, 14, 1: 73–84. Gramsci, A. (1971), Selections from Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Green, A. (1999), ‘Education and Globalisation in Europe and East Asia: Convergent and Divergent Trends’. Journal of Educational Policy, 14, 1: 55–71. Green, A. and Steedman, H. (1993), Education Provision, Education Attainment and the Needs of Identity: A Review of Research for Germany, France, Japan, the USA and Britain. London: NIESR. Gunther, H. and Ribbins, P. (2002), ‘Leadership Studies in Education: Towards a Map of the Field’. Educational Management and Administration, 30, 4: 387–416. Habermas, J. (1971), Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Hacking, I. (1999), The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hale, T. and Held, D. (2011), The Handbook of Transnational Governance: Institutions and Innovations. Chichester: Wiley. Halsey, A. H., Flood, J. and Martin, F. (1957), Social Class and Educational Opportunity. London: Greenwood Press. Halsey, A. H., Heath, A. and Ridge, J. (1980), Origins and Destinations. Oxford: Clarendon. Halstead, M. (1994), ‘Accountability and Values’, in D. Scott (ed.), Accountability and Control in Educational Settings. London: Cassell. Hanlon, G. (1998), ‘Professionalism as Enterprise: Service Class Politics and the Redefinition of Professionalism’. Sociology, 32, 1: 43–63. Hargreaves, A. (2010), The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Harris, A., Allen, T. and Goodall, J. (2008), Capturing Transformation: How Schools Secure and Sustain Improvement. London: Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. Harvey, D. (1989), The Conditions of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hassrick, E. and Schneider, B. (2009), ‘Parent Surveillance in Schools: A Question of Social Class’. American Journal of Education, 115, 2: 195–225. Hendrickson, K. (2012), Assessment in Finland: A Scholarly Reflection on One Country’s use of Formative, Summative, and Evaluative Practices, Mid-Western Educational Research Association, Graduate Student Scholarship, 25(1/2). [Available Online] Hensen, K. T. (1996), ‘Teachers as Researchers’, in J. Sikula (ed.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (4th edn). New York: Macmillan, pp. 53–66. Hernandez-Chavez, A. (2006), A Brief History. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

References

201

Herzog, S. J. (1964), Historia de la Expropriacion de las Empresas Petroleras. Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones. Hill, C. (2009), International Business. New York: McGraw Hill. Hill, N. (2001), ‘Parenting and Academic Socialization as they Relate to School Readiness: The Roles of Ethnicity and Family Income’. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 4: 686–97. Hilton, B. (2008), A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846. New Oxford History of England, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, F. (1977), Social Limits to Growth. London: Routledge. Hirschman, A. (1970), Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Response to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —(1986), Rival Views of Market Society and Other Essays. London: Viking. Holland, J., Gordon, T. and Lahelma, E. (2007), ‘Temporal, Spatial and Embodied Relations in the Teacher’s Day at School’. Ethnography and Education, 2, 2: 221–37. Holter, A. C. and Frabutt, J. M. (2011), Action Research in Catholic Schools: A Stepby-Step Guide for Practitioners (2nd edn). Notre Dame, in Alliance for Catholic Education Press. —(2012), ‘Mission Driven and Data Informed Leadership’. Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice, 15, 2: 253–69. Hoover-Dempsey, K., Walker, J., Sandler, H., Whetsel, D., Green, C., Wilkins, A. and Closson, K. (2005), ‘Why Do Parents Become Involved? Research Findings and Implications’. The Elementary School Journal, 106, 2: 105–30. Hopkins, D., Ahtaridou, P., Matthews, C., Posner, C. and Toledo Figueroa, D. (2007), Reflections on the Performance of the Mexican Education System. London, UK: London Centre for Leadership in Learning, Institute of Education, University of London, p. 82. Hopkins, D. and Posner, C. (2007), A Review of the Mexican School System in the light of PISA 2006. Paris: OECD. —(2010), A Review of the Mexican School System. Paris: OECD. Jackson, D. and Temperley, J. (2006), ‘From Professional Learning Community to Networked Learning Community’. Paper given at the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSI), Fort Lauderdale, 4 January. Jakku-Sihvonen, R. and Niemi, H. (2006), Research-Based Teacher Education in Finland. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Jessop, B. (1994), ‘Post-Fordism and the State’, in A. Amin (ed.), Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Jeynes, W. (2010), ‘The Salience of the Subtle Aspects of Parental Involvement and Encouraging that Involvement: Implications for School-based Programs’. The Teachers College Record, 112, 3: 1368–93. —(2011), Parental Involvement and Academic Success. New York: Routledge. Johnson, A. P. (2012), A Short Guide to Action Research (4th edn). New Jersey: Pearson Education.

202

References

Jones, K. and Hatcher, R. (1994), ‘Education, Progress and Economic Change: Notes on Some Recent Proposals’. British Journal of Educational Studies, 42: 245–60. Jones, R. (2001), ‘How Parents Can Support Learning: Not All Parent Involvement Programs Are Equal, but Research Shows What Works’. American School Board Journal, 188, 9: 18–22. Jörgensen, H. (2006), ‘The Inter-War Land Reforms in Estonia, Finland and Bulgaria: A Comparative Study’. Scandinavia Economic History Review, 54, 1: 64–97. Kaihari-Salminen, K. (2006), Curriculum Reform in Finnish Basic and General Upper Secondary Education, FNBE. [Power Point Presentation, Available Online] Karunaratne, N. (1980), ‘Export Orientated Industrialisation Strategy’. Intereconomics, 5: 1–34. Kelly, T. (2006), ‘Evidence’. Entry in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. [Available Online] Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. (1988), The Action Research Planner. Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press. Keynes, M. (2010 [1936]), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Kimble, C. (2008), Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Kirkup, T. and Shotwell, J. (1911), ‘Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de’, in H. Chisholm (ed.), Encyclopædia Britannica 24 (11th edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 45–7. Lauder, H. (1987), ‘The New Right and Educational Policy in New Zealand’. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 22: 3–23. —(1991), ‘Education, Democracy and the Economy’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 12: 417–31. Lawn, M. (2006), ‘Soft Governance and the Learning Spaces of Europe’. Comparative European Politics, Rethinking European Spaces, 4, 2: 33–52. Leithwood, K., Edge, K. and Jantzi, D. (1999), Educational Accountability: The State of the Arts. Gutersloh, Germany: Berelsmann Foundation Publishers. Lévi-Strauss, C. [1978] (2005), Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lingard, B. (2000), ‘It is and it isn’t: Vernacular Globalisation’, in N. Burbles and C. Torres (eds), Globalisation and Education: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 275–96. Lingard, B., Rawolle, S. and Taylor, S. (2005), ‘Globalising Policy Sociology in Education’. Journal of Education Policy, 20, 6: 132–54. Linnkylä, P., and Välijärvi, J. (2005), ‘Secrets to Literacy Success: The Finnish Story’. Education Canada, Canadian Education Association, 45: 34–7. Lipietz, A. (1987), Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis of Global Fordism. London: Verso. Lomnitz, C. (2000), Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico, An Anthropology of Nationalism. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

References

203

Lugaz, C. and De Grauwe, A. (eds) (2010), Schooling and Decentralization: Patterns and Policy Implications in Francophone West Africa. Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), UNESCO. Luke, A., Freebody, P., Lau Shun and Gopinathan, S. (2010), ‘Towards Research-based Innovation and Reform: Singapore Schooling in Transition’. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 34, 3: 23–78. Mahon, R. and McBride, S. (2009), The OECD and Transnational Governance. Vancouver: UBC Press. Mann, M. (2005), The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marchak, M. P. (1991), The Integrated Circus: The New Right and the Restructuring of Global Markets. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Markowicz, D. (2011), Gramsci, Antonio, The Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Michael Ryan. Chichester: Wiley. Marks, H. M., and Louis, K. S. (1997), ‘Does Teacher Empowerment Affect the Classroom? The Implication of Teacher Empowerment for Instruction, Practice and Student Performance’. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 19, 3: 245–75. Martínez, O. (2009), Un Futuro para la Escuela Pública. Mexico, DF: Ediciones de Educación y Cultura. Marx, K. (2005), The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers. Mauss, M. (1922), The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Mayhew, H. [1861] (2010), London Labour and the London Poor, ed. R. DouglasFairhurst. Buckingham: Open University Press. Mazzolini (1992), ‘The Myth of Globalisation’. European Journal of Communication, 7: 69–93. McCulloch, G. (2011), The Struggle for the History of Education. London and New York: Routledge. McKernan, J. (2008a), Curriculum Action Research: A Handbook of Methods and Resources for the Reflective Practitioner. London: Routledge. —(2008b), Curriculum and Imagination: Process Theory, Pedagogy and Action Research. London: Routledge. McNiff, J., Lomax, P. and Whitehead, J. (1996), You and Your Action Research Project. New York: Routledge. McTaggart, R. (1997), ‘Reading the Collection’, in R. McTaggart (ed.), Participatory Action Research. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 1–12. Mebrahtu, T., Crossley, M. and Johnson, D. (2000), ‘Educational Development and Social Transformation in a Global Economy’, in T. Mebrahtu, M. Crossley and D. Johnson (eds), Globalisation, Educational Transformation and Societies in Transition. Oxford: Symposium Books, pp. 9–19.

204

References

Merton, R. [1949] (1968), Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Macmillan USA. Messick, S. (1989), ‘Validity’, in R. Linn (ed.), Educational Measurement (3rd edn). Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Meyer, H-D. and Benavot, A. (eds) (2012), PISA, Power and Policy: The Emergence of Global Educational Governance. Oxford: Symposium Books. Michie, J. and Smith, J. G. (eds) (1995), Managing the Global Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Migdal, J. (2001), State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, G. E. (2011), Action Research: A Guide for the Teacher Researcher (4th edn). Boston: Pearson. Ministry of Education and Culture (2013a), Education in Finland. [Available Online] —(2013b), Education System in Finland. [Available Online] —(2013c), Degrees and Studies in Finnish Education System. [Available Online] Mintzberg, H. (2004), Managers, Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Mitchell, C. and Sackney, L. (2001), ‘Building Capacity for a Learning Community’. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, 19: 34. Morris, P. and Scott, I. (2003), ‘Shaping the Curriculum in Hong Kong’. Journal of Education Policy, 18, 1: 71–84. Murray, R. (1989), ‘Fordism and Post-Fordism’, in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), New Times. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Office of Evaluation and Oversight (2013), [Website Available]. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (1990), Higher Education in California. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2000), Manual for the PISA 2000 Database. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2001), Knowledge and Skills for Life: First Results from PISA. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2005), Teachers Matter – Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers. Education and Training Policy, Paris: OECD Publications. —(2006), Knowledge and Skills for Life: PISA. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2007a), Evidence in Education: Linking Research to Policy. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2007b), Quality and Equity of Schooling in Scotland. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2008a), Education at a Glance. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2008b), Education Policies and World Hegemony. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2010a), Education at a Glance 2010: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publications. [Available Online] —(2010b), OECD Reviews of Migrant Education – Closing the Gap for Immigrant Students. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2012), Mexico. Paris: OECD Publications. —(2014), PISA Programme. Paris: OECD Publications.

References

205

Ornelas, C. (2008), Política, poder y pupitres: Crítica al nuevo federalismo educativo. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. —(2011), El sistema educativo mexicano: la transición de fin de siglo. México: Fondo de la Cultura Económica. Osterman, K. F. and Kottkamp, R. B. (1993), Reflective Practice for Educators: Improving Schooling Through Professional Development. Newbury Park, CA: Corwin. Parsons, T. (1964), Essays in Sociological Theory. London: Free Press. Pearson Foundation (2011), Finland - Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education. [Available Online] Perrett, G. (2003), ‘Teacher Development Through Action Research: A Case Study in Focused Action Research’. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 27, 2: 1–10. Piesanen, E., Kiviniemi, U. and Valkonen, S. (2006), Follow Up and Evaluation of the Teacher Education Development Programme. Continuing Teacher Education in 2005 and its Follow-up 1998-2005 by Fields and Teaching Subjects in Different Types of Educational Institutions. University of Jyvaskyla, Occasional Papers 38. Piketty, T. (2014), Le Capital au XXIe Siècle. Paris: Seuil. Posner, C. (2002), ‘Education and the Philanthropic Ogre’. Comparative Education, 38, 4: 401–14. Prebisch, R. (1950), The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems. New York: United Nations. Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) (2011), Results. PIRLS. Psacharopoulos, G. (1984), ‘The Contribution of Education to Economic Growth: International Comparisons’, in J. Kendrick (ed.), International Productivity Comparisons and the Causes of the Slowdown. Cambridge: Ballinger for the American Enterprise Institute, pp. 335–60. —(1988), ‘Critical Issues in Education: A World Agenda’. International Journal of Educational Development, 8, 1: 1–7. Purcell, J. and Kaufman, S. (1977), ‘Mexican Business and Public Policy’, in J. Malloy (ed.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ravitch, D. (2013), Teacher Education in Finland. [A blog post available online] READ Project (2014), World Bank-funded Rural Education and Development (READ) Project. World Bank. Robinson, V., Hohepa, M. and Lloyd, C. (2009), School Leadership and Student Outcomes, Identifying What Works. Auckland: University of Auckland Press. Rowthorn, R. (1995), ‘Capital Formation and Unemployment’. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 11, 1: 26–39. Sahlberg, P. (2007), ‘Education Policies for Raising Student Learning: The Finnish Approach’. Journal of Education Policy, 22, 2: 147–71. —(2011), ‘Developing Effective Teachers and School Leaders: The Case of Finland’, in L. Darling-Hammond and R. Rothman (eds), Teacher and Leader Effectiveness in High-Performing Education Systems. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent

206

References

Education and Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, pp. 13–21. —(2012), A Model Lesson: Finland Shows is What Equal Opportunity Looks Like. American Educator, Spring. —(2013), Education in Europe Session 3. Talk by Pasi Sahlberg at the NYU Brademas Centre Events. [Available Online] Saks, M. (1995), Professions and the Public Interest: Medical Power, Altruism and Alternative Medicine. London: Routledge. Sammons and Bakkum (2011), ‘Effective Schools, Equity and Teacher Effectiveness, A Review of the Literature’. Profesorado Revista de curriculum y formacion del profesorado, 15, 3: 9–26. Sanguinetti, J. (2000), ‘An Adventure in Postmodern Action Research: Performativity, Professionalism and Power’, in J. Garrick and C. Rhodes (eds), Research and Knowledge at Work: Perspectives, Case Studies and Innovative Strategies. London and New York: Routledge. Sarason, S. B. (1990), The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform: Can We Change Course Before It’s Too Late? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sarjala, J. (2013), ‘Equality and Cooperation: Finland’s Path to Excellence’. American Educator, Spring 2013: 32–6. Schmuck, R. A. (1997), Practical Action Research for Change. Arlington Heights, IL: IRI/Skylight Training and Publishing. Schon, D. (2005), The Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) (1989a), National Curriculum Assessment Arrangements (1). London: SEAC. —(1989b), National Curriculum Assessment Arrangements (2). London: SEAC. Schwartz, A. (1987), Money in Historical Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, D. (2008), Curriculum Essays on Major Curriculum Theorists. London: Routledge. —(2010), Education, Epistemology and Critical Realism. London and New York: Routledge. —(2011), ‘PISA, International Comparisons, Epistemic Paradoxes’, in M. Pereyra, H-G. Kottoff and R. Cowen (eds), PISA Under Examination: Changing Knowledge, Changing Tests and Changing Schools. The Hague: SENSE. Scott, D., Posner, C., Martin, C., Guzman Flores, E., Alvarez-M, O., Zotzmann, K., Encinas, M., Demetriou, A., Alvarez, F., Andrews, R., Houssart, J. and DaleTunnicliffe, S. (2012), Final Report: Research and Developments Project: Curriculum Standards. Ministry of Education, Mexico. Scott, J. (2012), The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland SouthEast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sheldon, S. (2005), ‘Testing a Structural Equation Model of Partnership Program Implementation and Parental Involvement’. Elementary School Journal, 106, 2: 171–87.

References

207

Simola, H. (2005), ‘The Finnish Miracle of PISA: Historical and Sociological Remarks on Teaching and Teacher Education’. Comparative Education, 41, 4: 455–70. Simola, H., Rinne, R. and Kivirauma, J. (2002), ‘Abdication of the Education State or Just Shifting Responsibilities? The Appearance of a New System of Reason in Constructing Educational Governance and Social/Exclusion/Inclusion in Finland’. Scandinavian Journal of Education Research, 46, 3: 247–64. Singapore Teachers’ Union (2003), ‘On the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice at NIE’. STU Mentor Magazine, 11–12. Slee, R. (2011), The Irregular School – Exclusion, Schooling and Inclusive Education. London: Routledge. Smith, A. [1776] (1977), An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, P. (1979), Labyrinths of Power: Political Recruitment in Twentieth Century Mexico. Princetown: Princetown University Press. Smyth, J. (2001), ‘Critical Reflection: The antidote of being done to!’, in J. Smyth (ed.), Critical Politics of Teachers’ Work: An Australian Perspective. New York: Peter Lang. Spencer, H. (1993), Spencer: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Poltical Thought), ed. John Offer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Statistics Finland (2010), Number of Pupils Transferred to Special Education Unchanged, More Students in Part-time Special Education. [Available Online] Stobart (2008), Testing Times: The Uses and Abuses of Assessment. London: Routledge. Stoll, L., Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Wallace, M. and Thomas, S. (2006), Professional Learning Communities: A Review of the Literature. London: University of London. Street, L. and Timperly, R. (2005), Improving Schools through Collaborative Enquiry. London: Continuum. Stringer, E. T. (2008), Action Research in Education (2nd edn). New Jersey: Pearson. Toffler, A. (1990), Powershift. New York: Bantam. Torrance, H. (1981), ‘The Origins and Development of Mental Testing in England and the United States’. British Journal of the Sociology of Education, 2, 1: 45–59. Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (2012), Results. TIMMS. Troman, G. (1996), ‘The Rise of the New Professionals? The Restructuring of Primary Teachers’ Work and Professionalism’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 14, 4: 472–87. Tuovinen, J. E. (2008), ‘Learning the Craft of Teaching and Learning from the World’s Best Practice, The Case of Finland’, in D. M. McInerney and A. D. Liem (eds), Teaching and Learning: International Best Practice. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, pp. 51–77. Välijärvi, J. (2012), The History and Present of the Finnish Education System. SinoFinnish seminar on education systems, Shanghai.

208

References

Vernon, A. (2005), Quaker Business Man: The Life of Joseph Rowntree. London: Taylor and Francis. Vitikka, E., Krokfors, L. and Hurmerinta, E. (2011), The Finnish National Core Curriculum: Structure and Development. [Available Online] —(2012), The Finnish National Core Curriculum: Structure and Development, http:// curriculumredesign.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Finnish-National-CoreCurriculum_Vitikka-et-al.-2011.pdf. Wallerstein, I. (1984), The Politics of the World Economy: The States, The Movements and The Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webb, B. and Webb, S. [1932] (2010), Methods of Social Study. London: Academic. Weber, M. [1905] (2002), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Roxbury: Roxbury Publishing Company. Whitty, G. (2001), ‘Teacher Professionalism in New Times’, in D. Gleeson and C. Husbands (eds), The Performing School: Managing, Teaching and Learning in a Performance Culture. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer. —(2002), Making Sense of Education Policy: Studies in the Sociology and Politics of Education. London: Paul Chapman Publishers. Wiliam, D. (2011), Embedded Formative Assessment. New York: Solution Tree Press. Woodward, R. (2009), The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). London: Routledge. World Bank (2001), World Development Indicators. Washington, DC: The World Bank. —(2003), Case Study 3 – El Salvador: Participation in Macroeconomic Policy Making and Reform. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Young, M. (2007), Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. London: Routledge.

Author Index Aguayo, S.  107, 193 Aho, E.  145, 193 Ahtaridou, P.  201 Ainley, J.  43, 193 Alba, R.  104, 193 Allen, J.  189, 193 Allen, T.  182, 200 Alton-Lee, A.  43, 193 Alvarez-M.  206 Alvarez, F.  206 Andersen, L.  184, 193 Andrews, R.  206 Antonopoulou, K.  107, 193 Apple, M.  42, 193 Archer, M.  1, 177, 193 Arnal, S.  117, 193 Ashton, D.  189, 193

Booth, C.  18, 195 Borko, H.  49, 195 Bottery, M.  164, 189, 195 Boudon, R.  1, 177, 195 Bourdieu, P.  1, 19, 65, 169–71, 195 Bracey, G.  69–70, 195 Bracho, T.  107, 195 Brandon, R.  107, 195 Braudel, F.  19, 195 Brousseau, A.  49, 195 Brown, G.  137, 189, 195 Brown, M.  123, 195 Brown, P.  189, 196 Brunner, K.  184, 196 Burbles, N.  202 Burrawoy, M.  21, 196 Burwood, S.  117, 193

Babalis, T.  193 Bablawi, H.  179, 193 Bakkum, L.  14, 206 Ball, S.  38–9, 98, 111–2, 113–4, 164, 189, 194 Barber, M.  129, 194 Barnard, W.  105, 194 Barone, T.  183, 194 Barry, A.  158, 194 Barthes, R.  123, 194 Basave, A.  100, 194 Benavot, A.  54, 58, 60, 88, 204 Benjamin, L.  105, 194 Benson, R.  195 Berger, E.  107, 194 Berliner, D.  183, 194 Bernstein, B.  1, 62, 169, 177, 194 Berryman, M.  195 Bishop, R.  42, 195 Blackwell, B.  189, 194–5 Blanchard, J.  183, 194 Block, F.  189, 195 Bolam, R.  207

Cagan, P.  184, 196 Cajanov, A.  196 Canadian Council for Learning  12, 196 Carayannis, E.  163, 196 Cardoso, F.  196 Carnoy, M.  62, 189, 196 Carroll, P.  54, 59, 64, 196 Casanova, U.  183, 194 Castells, M.  196 Chaynov, A.  144, 196 Chen, M.  105, 198 Chisholm, H.  202 Clarke, K.  123–4, 196 Closson, K.  201 Coburn, C.  42, 196, 198 Coe, R.  126, 196 Cohen, S.  196 Comte, A.  90, 196 Cosio Villegas, D.  92, 196 Cowen, M.  21, 196 Cowen, R.  184, 206 Cowling, K.  189, 197 Crossley, M.  203

210 Dale-Tunnicliffe, S.  206 Darling-Hammond, L.  7–8, 152, 197, 205 Datnow, A.  12, 197 Davis, K.  19, 197 De Grauwe, A.  105, 203 Dearing Report  118–26, 197 Dearing Review  118–26, 197 Dearing, E.  105, 197 Demetriou, A.  206 Dewey, J.  189, 197 Dicken, P.  189, 197 Dinkelman, T.  183, 197 Djelic, M-L.  58, 197 Domina, T.  105, 197 Douglas-Fairhurst, R.  203 Durkheim, E.  15–17, 54, 132, 144, 168, 170, 178, 197 Eatwell, J.  189, 198 Edge, K.  105, 107, 198, 202 Edwards, R.  198 Eilon, S.  189, 195 Encinas, M.  206 Engel, G.  43, 198 Engels, F.  17, 198 Engeström, Y.  159, 198 Epstein, J.  104, 198 Escalante, F.  100, 198 Esping-Andersen, G.  189, 198 Etzioni, A.  189, 198 European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education  198 Fan, X.  105, 198 Febvre, L.  19, 198 Fenwick, T.  162, 198 Fitzgerald, E.  2, 199 Flood, J.  200 Foshay, W.  189, 199 Foucault, M.  112, 158, 199 Frabutt, J.  183, 201 Freebody, P.  183, 203 Freeman, C.  189, 199 Friedman, M.  184, 199 Freidson, E.  189, 199 Fueyo, V.  183, 199 Fullan, M.  7–8, 49, 50, 199

Author Index Galloway, A.  151, 199 Garrick, J.  206 Geddes, P.  18, 199 Giddens, A.  33, 199 Gill, S.  158, 199 Gipps, C.  195 Gleeson, D.  208 Goh Chok Tong  129, 131, 136, 199 Goh Chor Boon  200 Goodall, J.  182, 200 Goodson, I.  12, 200 Gopinathan, S.  183, 200, 203 Gordon, T.  201 Gough, N.  161, 200 Gramsci, A.  189, 200 Green, A.  189, 200 Green, C.  159, 201 Gunther, H.  113, 200 Guzman Flores, E.  206 Habermas, J.  115, 200 Hacking, I.  162, 200 Hale, T.  76, 200 Hall, S.  193, 204 Halsey, A.  61–2, 81, 189, 200 Halstead, M.  114, 200 Hanlon, G.  189, 200 Hargreaves, A.  6, 8, 41–3, 49–50, 199, 200 Harris, A.  182, 200 Harris, M.  196 Harvey, D.  189, 200 Hassrick, E.  106, 200 Hatcher, R.  189, 202 Heath, A.  200 Held, D.  76, 193, 200 Hendrickson, K.  153, 200 Hensen, K.  183, 200 Hernandez-Chavez, A.  90, 200 Herzog, S.  92, 201 Higgins, K.  195 Hill, C.  105, 201 Hill, N.  38, 201 Hilton, B.  23, 201 Hirsch, F.  189, 201 Hirschman, A.  2, 178, 189, 201 Hohepa, M.  182, 205 Holland, J.  153, 201 Holter, A.  183, 201

Author Index Hoover-Dempsey, K.  201 Hopkins, D.  13, 95, 179, 201 Houssart, J.  206 Hubbard, L.  197 Hurmerinta, E.  208 Husbands, C.  208 Jackson, D.  47, 201 Jacques, M.  204 Jakku-Sihvonen, R.  150, 153, 179, 201 Jantzi, D.  202 Jessop, B.  163, 201 Jeynes, W.  106, 201 Johnson, A.  20, 183, 201 Johnson, D.  203 Jones, K.  189, 202 Jones, R.  202 Jordan, J.  184, 193 Jörgensen, H.  143, 202 Kaihari-Salminen, K.  151, 202 Karunaratne, N.  134, 202 Kaufman, S.  89, 205 Kellow, A.  54, 59, 64, 196 Kelly, T.  179, 202 Kemmis, S.  183, 202 Kendrick, J.  205 Keynes, M.  183, 202 Khamsi, K.  198 Kimble, C.  42, 202 Kirkup, T.  90, 202 Kiviniemi, V.  205 Kivirauma, J.  207 Koorland, M.  183, 199 Kottkamp, R.  183, 205 Kottoff, H-G.  184, 206 Koutrouba, K.  193 Kreider, H.  197 Krokfors, L.  208 Lahelma, E.  201 Lau Shun  203 Lauder, H.  137, 189, 196, 202 Lawn, M.  161, 202 Leithwood, K.  44, 202 Levi-Strauss, C.  19, 202 Liem, A.  207 Lingard, B.  38, 53, 60, 141, 202 Linn, R.  204

Linnakylä, P.  145, 202 Lipietz, A.  189, 202 Lloyd, C.  182, 205 Lomax, P.  183, 203 Lomnitz, C.  85, 202 Louis, K.  183, 203 Luciani, G.  179, 193 Lugaz, C.  105, 203 Luke, A.  183, 203 Mahon, R.  54, 59, 203 Malloy, J.  205 Mann, M.  23, 29, 203 Marchak, M.  189, 203 Markowicz, D.  203 Marks, H.  183, 203 Martin, C.  206 Martin, F.  200 Martínez, O.  104, 203 Marx, K.  30, 180, 203 Matthews, C.  201 Mauss, M.  19, 170, 203 Mayhew, H.  18, 203 Mazzolini, J.  54, 203 McBride, S.  54, 60, 203 McCulloch, G.  188, 203 McGown, T.  183, 194 McGrew, T.  193 McInerney, D.  207 McKernan, J.  48, 203 McMahon, A.  207 McNiff, J.  183, 203 McTaggart, R.  183, 202–3 Mebrahtu, T.  54, 203 Mehan, H.  197 Meiselman, D.  184 Meltzer, A.  184, 199 Merton, R.  19, 180, 204 Messick, S.  67, 204 Meyer, H-D.  54, 58, 60, 88, 204 Michie, J.  189, 198–9 Migdal, J.  20, 29, 90, 94, 204 Milliband, D.  195, 198–9 Milliband, R.  203 Mills, G.  183, 204 Ministry of Education and Culture  149, 204 Mintzberg, H.  164, 204 Mitchell, C.  49, 204

211

212

Author Index

Morris, P.  12, 204 Mourshed, M.  129, 194 Murray, R.  189, 204 Neveu, E.  195 Niemi, H.  153, 179, 201 O’Sullivan, D.  195 Office of Evaluation and Oversight  59, 204 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)  6–7, 59–83, 92, 129, 146–7, 149, 183, 204 Ornelas, C.  205 Osborne, T.  194 Osterman, K.  183, 205 Panitch, L.  199 Parsons, T.  1, 19, 160, 177, 180, 205 Passeron, J-C.  65, 169, 195 Pearson Foundation  155, 205 Pereyra, M.  184, 206 Perrett, G.  183, 205 Pierce, T.  195 Piesanen, E.  154, 205 Piketty, T.  24, 205 Pitkänen, K.  153 Posner, C.  13, 95, 201, 206 Prebisch, R.  132, 205 Psacharopoulos, G.  11, 20, 61, 205 Purcell, J.  89, 205 Ravitch, D.  151, 154, 205 Rawolle, S.  202 Rhodes, C.  206 Ribbins, P.  113, 200 Ridge, J.  200 Riley, K.  198 Rinne, R.  206 Riojas-Cortez, M.  107, 194 Robinson, V.  182, 205 Rose, N.  194 Rothman, R.  8, 197, 205 Rowntree, J.  18, 168 Rowthorn, R.  189, 205 Rubenson, K.  64 Sackney, L.  49, 204 Sahlberg, P.  7, 145–9, 155, 179, 193, 205

Saks, M.  189, 206 Salhin-Andersson, K.  58, 197 Sammons, P.  14, 206 Sandler, H.  201 Sanguinetti, J.  114, 206 Sarason, S.  1, 11, 206 Sarjala, J.  145, 206 Sawchuk, P.  198 Scase, R.  189, 196 Schmuck, R.  183, 206 Schneider, B.  106, 200 Schon, D.  45–8, 206 School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC)  122, 206 Schwartz, A.  184, 199, 206 Scott, D.  80, 101, 141, 162, 178, 184, 200, 206 Scott, I.  12, 204 Scott, J.  108–9, 206 Sheldon, S.  106, 206 Shenton, R.  21, 197 Shotwell, J.  90, 202 Sikula, J.  194, 200 Sileo, N.  195 Simola, H.  145, 147, 155, 190, 206 Simpkins, S.  197 Singapore Teachers’ Union  43, 207 Slee, R.  40, 207 Sloan, J.  193 Smith, A.  28, 164, 180, 207 Smith, J.  189, 198, 204 Smith, P.  88, 207 Smyth, J.  112, 207 Spencer, H.  17–18, 207 Sperling, J.  193 Statistics Finland  207 Steedman, H.  189, 200 Stein, M.  42, 196, 198 Stobart, G.  42, 71, 207 Stoll, L.  183, 207 Street, L.  50, 207 Stringer, E.  183, 207 Sugden, R.  189, 197 Sung, J.  189, 193 Tao, S.  198 Tandy, R.  195 Taylor, S.  202 Temperley, J.  47, 50, 201, 207 Thomas, S.  207

Author Index Toffler, A.  189, 207 Toledo Figueroa, D.  201 Torrance, H.  72 Torres, C.  202 Troman, G.  189, 207 Tuovinen, J.  144, 207 Tymms, P.  126, 196 Välijärvi, J.  144, 146, 148–9, 153–4, 202, 207 Valkonen, S.  205 Vernon, A.  18, 168, 207 Vitikka, E.  150, 152, 207 Walker, J.  201 Wallace, M.  207 Wallerstein, I.  1, 177, 208 Webb, B.  18, 208

Webb, S.  18, 208 Weber, M.  16–18, 168, 208 Weiss, H.  197 Whetsel, D.  201 Whitehead, J.  183, 203 Whitty, G.  38, 40, 189, 208 Wiliam, D.  67, 183, 208 Wilkins, A.  201 Woodward, R.  61, 208 World Bank  31, 39, 103, 133, 180–1, 208 Wright, N.  189, 195 Young, M.  136, 208 Zamudio, A.  107, 195 Ziemnowicz, C.  163, 196 Zotzmann, K.  206

213

Subject Index Academia  11, 33 Academic Stream  136, 144 Academies  111, 188 Accountability  6–7, 24–6, 29, 40, 41–2, 57, 96–7, 100, 103, 113–7, 121, 124, 134, 137, 146, 148–50, 158, 162, 164, 173–5 Central Control Models  2–3, 39–41, 115 Consumer-Dominated Systems  3–4, 41–3, 45 Self-Evaluative Models  4–5, 43, 115 Evaluative State Models  3, 41 Act of Parliament  150 Basic Education in the Arts  150 Basic Education Act  148, 150 General Upper Secondary Schools Act  150 Liberal Adult Education Act  150 Vocational Education and Training Act  150 Action Research  47–9 Administrative Leadership  6 Agency  32, 177 Agrarian  143–4, 155 League (Maalaisliitto)  143 Revolution  14 Asian  23, 31 Development Bank  31 Tigers  23 Assessment  6, 28, 42, 59, 66, 68, 71, 78, 80, 85, 117–27 Formative  28, 119 Summative  64, 119 Authoritarian Capitalism  129 Autochthonous Response  37–8, 83, 163 Balkanization  50 Bilateral  32–3, 57 Aid  32 Institutions  32, 57

Bureaucracy  4, 7, 25, 27, 30, 31, 88–9, 92–3, 99, 102, 167 Models of the State  16, 24 Calderón Administration  102, 103 Capital Flows  11, 13, 17, 21, 32, 41, 55, 57, 106, 129, 137, 169 Causal Narrative  114, 169 Central Planning  89, 169 Value System  35, 131, 162 Centralization  26, 27, 86, 88, 111–12, 136 Centre Party (Suomen Keskusta)  143 Change  35–52 Capacity  24, 35–7 Chaos Theory  162 Charities  32, 57 City Technology College  111, 188 Civic Stream  144 Civil Society  16, 22–4, 27, 29, 32, 81, 103, 104, 167 Collaboration  43, 47, 49–51 Collegiality  42–3, 114, 164 Colonialism  100 Common Curriculum  8, 149, 166 Community of Practice  42–5 Comparison  69 Fair  69–70 Competency  68 Complex Systems  85, 160, 162 Compliance Capacity of the Workforce  111, 127, 167 Consolidation  118, 126–7 Construct Irrelevance Variance  67, 68, 72 Contrived Collegiality  43 Control  4–6, 18, 21, 29–30, 39, 54, 81, 83, 88, 91, 112, 115–16, 123–6 Corporate Vertical Integration  22 Corporatist State  5, 22, 25, 26, 29, 160, 167, 188

Subject Index Corporative-Clientelist Regime  21–2, 25, 29, 160, 167, 188 Corruption  22, 26, 97, 100 Countries Developed  14, 21, 29, 31, 61, 130 Developing  61, 105 Criteria for Judging Quality  111, 127, 167 Cronyism  26 Cultural Arbitraries  171 Bias  65, 68–9, 73 Capital  3, 13, 41, 55, 104, 169 Norms  4 Curriculum  192, 199 Development  33, 48, 146, 150–3 Development Institute  135, 189 Instrumentalist  5, 133 Materials  135 Standards  13, 78, 80, 94, 95–8, 184, 185, 186 Customary Practices  100 Data Technology  161 Dearing Report  118, 124–7 Review  118, 124–7 Decentralisation  26, 136, 151 Deconcentration  111 Deprofessionalisation  112 Destatisation  111–12, 138 Devolution  146–7, 151, 155, 190 Disarticulation  111 Discursive Structure  14, 37, 42, 83, 116, 131 Disguises  169 Disposition  5, 41, 66, 69–70, 72, 135, 140, 166, 174 Diversification  138 Down-up Curriculum Reform  13 East Africa  11 Economic Reconstruction  11 Educación con Participación de la Comunidad (EDUCO)  34 Education Adult  59, 150 Comparative  150, 158, 181 Inequalities  169–71 Institutions  70, 82, 90, 145, 164

215

Judgements  9, 39, 41, 43, 67, 179, 181–2 Moral  111, 113, 144, 164, 170 Policy  6, 21, 38, 181 Recurrent  64 System  157–71 Egalitarianism  165 Enculturation  49 England  111–128 English Pragmatists  17, 18 Epistemological Realism  177 Epistemology  112, 116 Ethnic Diversity  27 European Economic Community  60 Evaluación Nacional Del Logro Académico en Centros Escolares (ENLACE)  9, 79–80, 95–7, 100–3, 179 Examen Para La Calidad Y El Logro Educativo (EXCALE)  79 Exit  41, 178 Exogenous or Extra-National Influences  37, 163 Experimentation  8, 47, 66, 153 Exploration and Development  36 Export Oriented Industrialisation (EOI)  134 Extension  38 Finland  143–56 Finnish Education Evaluation Council  150 Finnish Social Democratic Party (Suomen Sosialdemokraattinen Puolue (SDP))  143 Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset)  143 Flexibilisation  111 Forms of Change  162 Contingent Ontological  162 Epistemically-Driven Ontological  162 Epistemological Planned  162 Ontological  162 Fox Administration  102–4 Functionalism  177 General Certificate of Education (GCSE)  123–4, 127 Global Education Reform Movement (GERM)  155–6 Global Panopticism  158

216

Subject Index

Globalisation  6, 27, 32, 37–8, 53–4, 60, 82–3, 163, 165 Grant Maintained School  111, 188 Habitus  169 Hierarchy  6, 38, 181 High-Stakes Testing  6, 96, 103, 172 Higher Education  11, 20, 63, 70, 90, 144, 164, 168, 183–4 Home-Based Participation  104 Hong Kong  12 Horizontal Bonds of Loyalty  5, 59 Human Rights  12 Identity  20–2, 59, 132–4, 141 Immigration  7 Implementation  11–34, 184–7 Capacity  35–8 Phase  35–8 Sites  35–8 Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI)  132 India  21–2, 26, 32–3, 133 Input/Output Model  62–3 Inquisitorial Phase  65, 74, 77 Inspection  40, 112–13, 126, 138, 150, 158, 161, 189 Institute of Technical Education (ITE)  135 Institutionalisation and Sustainability Processes  35–8 Intelligence  120 Intensity Reform  35–8, 106, 139–40, 163 Inter-American Development Bank  31 International Community of Nations  29 Comparative Assessment Systems  66–73 Competitiveness  114 Development Bank  36 Monetary Fund  56, 61 Interventions  75–80, 81–84 Invisible Hand of the Market  21, 64 Japan  23, 27, 132 Keynesian Economic Approach  57–8, 64 Welfare State  57–8, 64

Knowledge  5, 29, 41, 44–5, 47, 50, 64, 91, 112, 115–16, 125, 139–41, 147, 160, 162, 167, 174, 177 Labour Mobility  66 Laissez-Faire Regime  21–2, 24, 28, 167 Language Policy  27 Large Scale Reforms  33 Lateral Capacity Building  8, 153 Least Developed Countries  21, 29 Lifelong Learning  49, 64, 154 Machine Bureaucracies  164 Malleability of the System  20, 35, 37, 139–40, 163 Managerialism  113 Market Forces  24, 27, 64–5, 115 Market-Driven Model  1, 9, 28, 90 Marxists  17–18 Material Capital  169 Mattering Maps  23, 29, 94 Mechanism  18, 24–6, 28, 37, 40, 48, 54, 60, 63–4, 70–1, 73, 82–3, 90–1, 109, 114–17, 126, 158–9, 161–2, 178, 184–6 Meta-Pragmatic Models of the State  31 Mexico  85–110 Mode of Production  17–18, 30 Modes of Interpretation Readerly  123 Writerly  123 Multi-level Scalar  57 Multiple-Choice Test  67 National Curriculum  25–6, 85, 112, 117, 120, 124–5, 126–9, 136, 146, 150, 180 Revolutionary Party (PRI)  86 Rituals  29 Secretariat of Education (SEP) in Mexico  94–6 Nationhood  4 Neo-Fordist Model  137 Neo-Liberalism  26, 82, 136, 165 Networking  22, 85–6, 150, 182 Nicaragua  2 Non-Predictability  162

Subject Index Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)  53–84 Research and Evaluation Studies  67 Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED)  113, 126, 189 Opportunism  99 Parent-Teacher Communications  105, 107 Parental and Community Participation  105–7 Parental Involvement Apathy  104–7 Distrust of the Education System  104–7 Inflexible Schedules  104–7 Personal Constraints and Stress  104–7 Teachers’ Dislike of Different Parenting Styles  104–7 Transportation Difficulties  104–7 Patrimonial Societies  4, 22, 25, 93 Patron-Client Society  4–5, 22, 94, 98–9 Pedagogic Device  178 Pedagogy  11, 42, 101, 115, 127, 135, 139–40, 146, 151, 166, 188 People’s Action Party (PAP)  129 Performance Monitoring  27 Performativity  113–14 Personalised Learning  149 Phased or Stage Theory of History  177 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)  66–73 Policy Borrowing  37, 83, 163 Centrally-Controlled  39–41 Fragmented and Multi-Directional  39–41 Pluralist  4, 35–6, 139 Point of Entry and Direction of Flow  39–41 Text  2, 36, 39, 139 Uni-Directional  39–41 Political-Economic Analyses of the State  21 Population Heterogeneous  4 Homogeneous  4 Pragmatism  99, 146 Pre-Industrial Societies  144 Private Language Schools  160–1 Probability  162 Problem-Solving  45, 64, 141–2, 152

217

Productive Autonomous Performativity  113 Professional Development  41–5, 47–9, 79, 116, 154, 165, 181 Status of the Profession  112–3 Professionalisation  8–9, 23, 26, 96, 112, 136 Progression  118, 159, 161, 185–6 Psychometric Tradition of Assessment and Evaluation  66–73 Public Good  28, 109, 180 Order Act  131 Quality Assurance  59, 114, 116, 131 Quasi-Market model  3, 39, 41–2, 116 Reading  31, 71, 150, 154, 181, 190 Reading Programmes  34 Reflection-on-Action  45–9 Reflective Practitioner  45–9 Rentier State  5, 23, 94, 179 Resistance  12, 21, 38, 49, 83, 88, 98, 103, 134, 140, 164, 167 Retroductive Mode of Inference  67 Rewards and Sanctions for Teachers  111, 127, 167 Rituals of Belonging  29 Role Model  180 Strain  180 School Appraisal Branch of the Ministry of Education  138 Choice  24, 29 Classroom  91 Free  111, 189 Organisation  6 Special  70 Variance  7 Schumperterian Workfare State  163 Second World War  58 Segmented Protectionist Regime  21–2, 167 Selection  4–5, 45, 54, 63, 73, 82, 89–90, 93–4, 106, 157, 167, 188 Singapore  129–142

218

Subject Index

Skills  5, 41, 54, 64, 66, 70–2, 104, 113, 119, 125, 130, 134 Social Apprenticeship  15, 19, 54, 61, 170 Capital  21, 58, 106, 169 Democratic Regime  21, 23, 28 Division of Labour  17, 30, 82, 145, 160, 170, 178 Justice  40, 146 Participation Model  1, 3, 9 Sciences  15, 17–18, 192 Socialisation  170 Solidarity Mechanical  4, 17, 132, 144–5, 178 Organic  17, 144–5, 178 Space  7, 30, 42, 57, 75, 89, 116, 167, 168 Specialization  138, 160 Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs)  96, 118 Standardised Testing  6, 25, 28, 44, 149–50 Statism  128–142 Streaming  137–8, 146, 151 Structure  1, 14, 18, 26, 35, 37, 45, 71, 76, 78, 114, 140, 144, 151, 160, 166, 170, 173, 177–8 Supply Side Economics  63 Surveillance  106, 161

Taiwan  23, 27 Targets  6, 40, 44, 118, 122–3, 141, 150, 152, 162 Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT)  117, 119, 120–2 Teacher Learning Communities  42–51 Teacher Training  25, 33, 40, 45, 91, 135, 146, 154, 171–2, 187, 189 Technical-Rationality Thinking  161 Technocratic School Culture  7 Top-Down Model  1–3, 6, 9, 12–13, 25, 39, 45, 108, 134, 137–8, 150 Unintended Consequences of Actions  180 United States  8, 11, 24, 62–3, 153, 168 University of London  13, 94–7 Vernacular Globalisation  38, 53, 60, 83, 141 Vocational and Industrial Training Board (VITB)  135 Voice  3, 23, 41, 80, 87, 178 Washback Effects  70–1, 117 Working Class  18, 86, 91 World Governing Body  60