全民教育政策转移中的国际非政府组织——以全球教育运动联盟为个案

随着全球化的发展,各国在教育领域开展愈加丰富的全球教育合作与交流,跨国间教育政策的转移扩散日益成为一种普遍的社会现象和行为。其中,国际非政府组织的一些跨国的行为者,在传播教育基本价值与规范、促进国际教育合作交流、融合与扩散国际教育政策等方面日益显示出重要的作用。在全民教育政策的跨国转移扩散发展进程中,非政府组织通过跨国倡议网络机制发挥着重要作用。以全球教育运动联盟为个案,考察全球教育运动网络、传播全民教育政策过程中倡议的基本理念与采取的主要集体行动策略,将有助于更好地理解非政府组织在国际教育政策转移方面发挥的重要作用。     

Privatization Or Marketization: Educational Development in Post-Mao China

In the post-Mao era, the reformers have taken significant steps to privatize social policy and social welfare. Revamping the social security system and commodifying social services have become more prominent since the mid-eighties. Despite the post-Mao leaders' discomfort about the term "privatization", signs of state withdrawal from the provision of social policy and welfare are clear. The author argues that the emergence of private educational institutions indicates that China's educational development has gone through a similar process of privatization or quasi-marketization though the Chinese experience is different from that of Western counterparts. Specifically, this paper tries to examine how the flourishing market economy and the policy of decentralization have affected the development of China's higher education. No longer solely relying on public schools, private and minban (people run) educational institutions are becoming more popular in the new socialist market system. This paper attempts to examine how privatization and quasi- marketization have affected educational development in mainland China. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the privatization of education in China.     

The ethics of competition: accountability policy enactment in Chilean schools’ everyday life

ABSTRACT

Public policies have a moral order, an ethical horizon. They offer a vocabulary of imagined micro-policies. Using the case of Chile, this paper examines the ways in which accountability policies are reworked within schools and how they affect actors’ subjectivities. It adds new findings to the existing body of research on school accountability policies, offering in-depth evidence based on the case of Chile, which has a high-stakes testing model and a widespread competitive voucher system. The research is based on case studies of ten public and private subsidised schools, framed by a sociological perspective of policy enactment theory. The research findings show the ways that accountability policies are recreated, expanded, and intensified at the local level, permeating an ethic of competition. The analysis focuses on three qualitative trends: school actors’ sense-making of test scores and labels; zones of safety and risk for teachers under an accountability regime; and the emergence of a sticky web of persuasion, surveillance, and coercion among school members in order to improve performance. The practices examined are not understood as ‘secondary effects’ or an ‘implementation problem’, as if they occur unconnected from the policy rationale. The outcomes are consistent with the policy itself in interaction with school life.     

Fee-free education,decentralisation and the politics of scale in Papua New Guinea

Policies aimed at both reducing the costs associated with schooling (particularly through fee-free education) and decentralising responsibility for education delivery have become a central part of international education doctrine. This article draws on the ‘politics of scale’ literature to highlight how these education reforms are contested at different scales, in turn leading to uneven administrative and material outcomes. It examines education policy reforms in Papua New Guinea, which have – contra international trends – sidelined non-state actors and strengthened the state’s role in managing education services. National fee-free education policy has been contested at different administrative scales. Church administrators have rallied (without much success) at national directives; subnational administrators and politicians have had greater success, rolling back some aspects of national policy; while local-level schools have employed their own tactics to resist national fee-free education policy. In turn, this case study highlights how fee-free educational policy shapes and is shaped by conflict at multiple administrative scales. The article’s findings have implications for debates about the relationship between fee-free education and decentralisation policies.     

英美两国公共教育私有化比较与分析

作为最主要的两个西方国家,英美两国所引导的公共教育私有化运动已经成为21世纪教育发展的一个新潮流。英关两国公共教育私有化的理论背景是让政府适当地从教育领域退出来,交由私人组织去经营,但实施起来,英美两国却采取了不同的政策。英国采取了由上而下的四方面政策：竞争投标、公私合营、私人启动金和接管。而美国则由下而上地推广教育私有化进程,并相比于英国更为顺利,但两国同时也暴露出一些深层次的问题。     

Envisioned and enacted practices: educational policies and the ‘politics of use’ in schools

ABSTRACT

It is widely known that there is a discrepancy between educational policy on the one side, and teaching and learning practices on the other. Most studies have been focusing on the sociocultural and micropolitical frames that shape teachers’ understandings and enactments of teaching, and that cause the vast diversity of classroom practices around the world. This article wants to draw attention to the ‘politics of use’ in teachers’ work: how teachers mobilize larger political narratives when implementing curriculum reform. Arguably, these narratives provide a shortcut between the central government and street-level actors, thus circumventing the logics of these actors’ immediate institutional environments.

In order to showcase the politics of use, the article uses the case of education for creativity as it is designed for and practiced at Chinese schools. The case reveals how education for creativity is compromised by requirements emanating from larger political programs when implemented in Chinese classrooms. The article challenges the view that educational policy necessarily moves through a trickle-down process, from higher to medium to lower-level actors. In cases of strong ideological alignment between street-level actors and central state actors, educational policy may in fact sidestep and hence neutralize important institutional actors.     

美国私立高等教育发展中政府角色的探析:基于实证研究文献的分析

20世纪90年代以来,随着私营化改革向教育领域的渗透,公、私立高校之间、政府与私立高等院校之间的关系也在逐渐地发生变化。美国不少研究者通过实证研究分析政府政策的哪些政策因素能够促进或阻碍私立高等院校的发展。本文旨在通过对这些文献的分析,总结不同类型的政府政策和公、私立高等院校竞争状态下的私立高等教育发展状况,希望能对我国民办高等教育的发展提供启示。     

Artificial intelligence and education in China

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the political economy of artificial intelligence (AI) and education in China, through an analysis of government policy and private sector enterprise. While media and policy discourse often portray China’s AI development in terms of a unified national strategy, and a burgeoning geopolitical contestation for future global dominance, this analysis will suggest a more nuanced internal complexity, involving differing regional networks and international corporate activity. The first section considers two key policy documents published by the central Chinese government, which are shown to implicate educational institutions as influential actors in national and regional strategies for AI development, with a significant role in plans to train domestic expertise. The second section outlines three prominent private education companies: New Oriental Group, Tomorrow Advancing Life (TAL), and Squirrel AI. These companies are selected to represent important aspects of China’s development of educational AI applications, including the influence of a well-established private education sector, and a growing interest in international corporate activity. The paper concludes with the suggestion that while central government policy reserves a significant role for education in the national AI strategy, the private sector is utilising favourable political conditions to rapidly develop educational applications and markets.     

Beyond workforce preparation: contested visions of ‘twenty-first century’ education reform

ABSTRACT

Contrary to educational policy and research assumptions about an immanent ‘twenty-first century’ future, this article uses the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ to trace how nonprofit actors in California invented and materialized distinctive visions of educational progress. Drawing on interview and ethnographic fieldnote data, I illustrate two contrasting sociotechnical visions: A Silicon Valley vision that aimed to reduce inequalities in test-based outcomes by disseminating ‘achievement technologies’; and an Oakland vision that aspired to address systemic environmental, economic and educational inequities using ‘civic technologies’. The diversity of these futures, and the distinctive kinds of digital technologies that co-produced these visions, trouble assumptions about ‘technology’ as an unquestioned good and problematize constructions of the ‘twenty-first century’ as an ostensibly shared, democratic future. I conclude by encouraging educational researchers to clarify a politics of the ‘twenty-first century’ and explore how ‘bounded imaginaries’, like those evident in the Oakland case, offer a potentially fruitful basis for reframing global education technology policies.     

Old Educational Ideas,New American Schools: Progressivism and the Rhetoric of Educational Revolution∗

Drawing on books and essays of prominent progressive educators, this essay seeks to identify key elements that should be included in a working definition of progressive education. Such a definition is crucial for determining the degree of influence progressive ideas have had on American schools. The essay looks at how these ideas appear to have influenced the designs of a number of highly visible "whole-school reform" programs in the United States, programs that are perhaps the leading educational reform effort in the United States today. The essay then assesses how effective these programs have been in boosting student achievement. The essay concludes by speculating that the oft-used rhetoric of educational revolution, which was employed by early progressive educators and by later whole-school reformers, is a serious obstacle to genuine improvement in educational policy and practice.     

Organizational rhetoric in the prospectuses of elite private schools: unpacking strategies of persuasion

The way in which private schools use rhetoric in their communications offers important insights into how these organizational sites persuade audiences and leverage marketplace advantage in the context of contemporary educational platforms. Through systemic analysis of rhetorical strategies employed in 65 ‘elite’ school prospectuses in Australia, this paper contributes to understandings of the ways schools’ communications draw on broader cultural politics in order to shape meanings and interactions among organizational actors. We identify six strategies consistently used by schools to this end: identification, juxtapositioning, bolstering or self-promotion, partial reporting, self-expansion, and reframing or reversal. We argue that, in the context of marketization and privatization discourses in twenty-first-century western education, these strategies attempt to subvert potentially threatening discourses, in the process actively reproducing broader economic and social privilege and inequalities.     

Policy,philanthropy and profit: the OECD’s PISA for Schools and new modes of heterarchical educational governance

This paper examines the development and administration of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools – a new testing instrument of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – to demonstrate the relevance of heterarchical processes to educational governance. Drawing suggestively across new ‘relational’ thinking around policy networks, and new spatialities associated with globalisation, the research shows how PISA for Schools helps constitute new spaces and relations of, and for, educational governance. Informed by policy documents and interviews conducted with 33 key actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, I show how PISA for Schools typifies contemporary educational policy-making and governance via the export of ‘statework’ to private actors and agencies, including intergovernmental organisations, philanthropic foundations and edu-businesses. I conclude by considering how treating PISA for Schools, and other similar education services, as a ‘product’ produces a potentially dangerous blurring of public and private benefits, with the potential that (private) profit might ultimately trump (public) education.     

Culture matters in educational policy transfer: the case of curricular reforms in the two Koreas during the Soviet and US military occupation

This paper investigates the influence of cultural and historical factors on educational policy transfer, drawing on an analysis of the curricular reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation of the two Koreas. In South Korea, curricular changes were made, such as the introduction of the subject of social studies, in order to teach democratic procedures and concepts. In North Korea, a socialist–communist ideology was extensively promoted, along with an attraction to the Soviet Union as a model state to follow. In both contexts, the localization of the reforms was influenced by the authoritarian legacy of Confucianism and Japanese colonization, and the nationalism that had been fostered for the purpose of state formation. The Korean case indicates that while investigating the influence of culture on educational policy transfer, it is important to identify the unique characteristics of educational traditions and nationalism of a country, and to analyze how the newly transferred policies and ideas are received by local actors in their searches for meaning and power.     

PISA: multiple ‘truths’ and mediatised global governance

The OECD’s PISA programme has been portrayed as central to the emergence of a regime of global educational governance and the subsequent convergence of policies towards a standardised model. Whilst there is an extensive literature describing PISA’s impact on education policies, there is a paucity of analysis of how PISA data is presented to the public within nations by three main actors which interpret the results; namely the OECD itself, politicians, and the media. This study analyses how England’s 2012 PISA results were interpreted by those actors, focusing particularly on the role of the media. We demonstrate that the OECD’s original messages were significantly distorted by the UK Government and show how the media, driven by its own logic, framed the results in terms of a narrative of decline, crisis and the need for urgent reform, while, significantly, giving little coverage to either the recommended policy actions or the contrasting interpretations of the PISA results by politicians and the OECD. We argue that a form of ‘mediatised governance’ shaped and limited the overall frame within which the results were debated and had a powerful influence on how local politicians represented the PISA results and advocated their own policy actions.     

How Government Policy Is Implemented in the Private University: A Case Study from China

This article is based on original research into institutional governance in private universities. It provides an in-depth qualitative study of how the private university in China has responded in practice to government policies. The analysis focuses on three dimensions: the roles of the university council, the president, and the university constitution. The study adopted two methods of data collection: 31 separate semi-structured interviews with 21 informants as well as extensive documentary analysis. Findings revealed that while external policies provide an impetus for change for each university, how key actors in institutional governance understand these policies has a significant effect on how the policies are implemented. This can result in change that can be viewed as either symbolic alteration or as operational change. This study provides insights from an empirical investigation by way of a case study on private university governance in China, and also a referential perspective on the governance of private universities in general for policy makers, senior managers, and academics.     

‘Philanthropizing’ consent: how a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations’ use of material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to garner the consent of multiple social and institutional actors to support a public policy. In other words, these foundations do not impose policies on governments; rather, they ‘render technical’ high-stakes political debates on pressing issues of educational equity and then influence state officials’ consensus about which policies to adopt. We argue that this philanthropic influence is not simply a neoliberal, profit-maximizing scheme; rather, it is an attempt by foundation and corporate leaders to garner power and influence on different scales, and re-make public education in their own image. Although this educational policy game is in many ways participatory and widely accepted, foundations are only able to play this role due to their tremendous economic power, a direct product of the unequal global political economy, and the systematic defunding of the public sphere.     

Living in an era of comparisons: comparative research on policy,curriculum and teaching

ABSTRACT

The articles in this special issue include different perspectives on comparative policy studies with an aim to understand transnational education policies in relation to the logic of national educational systems and to grasp the ongoing reframing of teacher identity and teaching as a result of the policy activities of ‘new’ and coordinated international actors. This special issue aims to contribute to a continued qualified investigation in curriculum issues at the various levels within the public education system, as well as in the international policy movements, affecting public education differently in different nations. A ‘comparative curriculum research’ inspired by theories and methods from comparative education might be helpful in this endeavour.     

Multiple paths towards education privatization in a globalizing world: a cultural political economy review

Over the last two decades, education privatization has become a widespread phenomenon, affecting most education systems and giving place to a consistent increase in private school enrolment globally. However, far from being a monolithic phenomenon, privatization advances through a variety of context-sensitive policy processes that translate into multiple policy outcomes. This paper aims at understanding why and how education privatization unfolds in a broad variety of settings and, to this purpose, examines the different manifestations of education privatization on the light of Cultural Political Economy (CPE). The conceptual and analytical tools provided by CPE prove to be particularly well suited to explore such a multi-faceted and multi-scalar phenomenon. CPE has helped us to capture the intersect and tension between different drivers (global and local, material and ideational) of education privatization through the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. On the basis of a systematic literature review methodology, encompassing 227 research papers, the article identifies and systematizes six different paths towards education privatization – understood as groups of frequently associated circumstances, mechanisms and courses of action leading to privatization. Conceived as ideal types, these different paths ultimately allow for a richer understanding of education privatization and show that the international diffusion of education privatization norms and discourses is far from producing policy convergence at a global scale.     

Discourse analysis as theory,method, and epistemology in studies of education policy

ABSTRACT

Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication, and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself (e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often left implicit which can lead to murky relations to larger onto-epistemological questions of how we construct findings from data as well as the nature of policy. In this interpretive analysis, we synthesize a corpus of 37 peer-reviewed journal articles that bring together educational policy and analyses of discourse from varying theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to better understand the breadth and scope of how discourse is defined and operationalized in studies of educational policy, including in ways that are sometimes incommensurate with authors' stated theoretical and methodological positions. After first laying the theoretical groundwork for analyses of discourse in the field of educational policy, we then illustrate how discourse analysis is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, within contested paradigmatic landscapes. We conclude with an argument for discussions across theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms about how the concept of discourse lends itself to different epistemological vantage points on educational policy.     

The configurative agency of metrics in education: a research agenda involving a different engagement with data

ABSTRACT

The increased use of quantitative education data is often regarded by scholars as evidence of the emergence of’governing by numbers’. These scholars ascribe major stakeholders such as the OECD and nation states agency as they produce, distribute and consume data, and respond to these with policy and management initiatives. This paper argues that metrics themselves have a configurative agency that affects education in terms of educational ideas and designs. The paper illustrates this point by analysing two cases of graduate employability metrics, each of which configures education differently, and discusses how the configurative agency of metrics can become the focal point of a different research agenda using distinct analytical concepts drawn from the sociology of quantification and new materialism. The paper concludes that such a research agenda can enable actors involved in the design and development of education to enter into a professional dialogue and engagement with education data, rather than merely dismissing it.