Governing schooling through ‘what works’: the OECD’s PISA for Schools

This paper explores Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, a local variant of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD’s) influential PISA that not only assesses an individual school’s performance in reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems, but also promotes 17 identical examples of ‘best practice’ from ‘world class’ schooling systems (e.g. Shanghai-China, Singapore). Informed by 33 semi-structured interviews with actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, and supplemented by the analysis of relevant documents, the paper provides an account of how these concrete examples of best practice are represented in the report received by participating schools. Drawing upon thinking around processes of commensuration and the notion of ‘governing by examples’, the paper argues that PISA for Schools discursively positions participating schools as somehow being commensurable with successful schooling systems, eliding any sense that certain cultural and historical factors – or ‘out of school’ factors – are inexorably linked to student performance. Beyond encouraging the problematic school-level borrowing of policies and practices from contextually distinct schooling systems, I argue that this positions the OECD as both the global expert on education policy and now, with PISA for Schools, the local expert on ‘what works’.     

Management of Innovations from a Cultural-Individual Perspective

The history of education and schooling is characterised by not only the attainment of results but also ongoing critique of the existing situation in education and schooling. Developers and researchers are, as a result, constantly seeking new strategies and methods for the improved implementation of innovations in actual educational practice. The central question is which factors and which conditions facilitate the effects of innovations. In an attempt to answer this question, many educators will not so much be concerned with objective structural factors such as available funds, classmates, et cetera. They will be concerned, rather, with the questions of which socially constructed realities and which particular forms of involvement on the part of teachers, school administrators, and counsellors facilitate successful innovation. In our search for an answer to these questions, moreover, we will be guided by a cultural-individual perspective on innovation. Traditional innovative strategies – and, in particular, large scale strategies – seem not always suitable to deal with today's educational problems. Alternative scenario's for the management of innovations are considered.     

Virtue and Character in Higher Education

Despite much recent concern with the possibilities of moral character education in elementary schooling and professional training, the university and higher educational prospects of such education have only lately received much attention. This paper begins by considering – and largely endorsing – the general case for character education in contexts of pre-adult schooling and adult professional and vocational training. However, it proceeds to argue that the case for intervention in character formation in some educational contexts is not generally applicable to university and higher education. Key points are that there can be no clear normative warrant for such intervention in the case of learners who are: (i) beyond the age of majority and (ii) voluntarily engaged in study wherein significant professional or public implications of personal character development are not a pressing concern. In short, while good moral character is clearly of general human importance, its deliberate or explicit promotion may not be equally warranted in all educational contexts.     

The Hearing School: an exploration of sound and listening in the modern school

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the urban landscape; institutions which were designed to discipline, control and shape urban bodies – the prison, the workhouse, the asylum, the reformatory, the children's home and the school. This paper focuses on one of these sites of childhood control: the school. Historians of education and childhood have to date paid little attention to the sensory worlds of schooling and childhood. This study focuses on one sense – hearing. Hearing, sound and aurality have been shown to be deeply implicated in modernity's daily elaboration. The study explores the sounds of modern schooling; the culture of listening in modern schools; the materiality of the modern school “soundscape”; and the influence of architectural acoustics on the culture of listening. In doing so, the study addresses the problems, sources and methodologies involved in writing a history of the hearing school.     

探索区域性开放大学的建设发展模式——以云南开放大学试点建设为例

开放大学建设已经不再是狭义的教育发展任务或高等教育结构的调整,而是广义的社会发展范畴,或者说是改善民生、促进人本发展的社会工程,这就决定了开放大学的建设必然是政府的责任,必须依靠政府的责任履行和有效作为。开放大学应按照“大学＋平台＋体系”的总体构架,鉴于广播电视大学的以系统办学模式取得过巨大的成功,开放大学的建设需要依托广播电视大学。但开放大学体系建设只应当对广播电视大学的系统进行借鉴,而不能直接“翻牌”。拥有办学自主权,包括本科颁证权和学位授予权是区域性开放大学的集体诉求,如果区域性开放大学没有办学自主权,那就失去了追求教育开放性和实现终身教育理念的可能。     

Fish out of water: refugee and international students in mainstream Australian schools

In this paper, the authors combine Pierre Bourdieu's concept of hysteresis (the ‘fish out of water’ experience) with the discourse historical approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a theoretical and analytical framework through which they examine specific moments in the schooling experiences of one refugee student and one international student, both enrolled in post-compulsory education in Australian mainstream secondary schools. We examine specific moments – as narrated by these students during interviews – in which these students can be described as ‘fish out of water’. As such, this paper takes up the concerns of researchers who call for an examination of the lived geographies and the everyday lives of individual students in mainstream schools. We find that our students' habitus, conditioned by their previous schooling experiences in their home countries, did not match their new Australian schools, resulting in frustration with, and alienation from, their mainstream schools. However, we also note that schools, too, need to adapt and adjust their habitus to the new multicultural world, in which there are international and refugee students among their usual cohort of mainstream students.     

Time for inclusion?

This article examines the constraints of modern temporality which are antithetical to the careful consideration that working with diverse learners requires for the development of inclusive, democratic education. We take up the conceptual construct of time to explore how it mediates systemic practices that impact policy positions of inclusion in initial teacher education and schooling. Our analysis demonstrates that temporality shapes the possibilities of inclusive practice within which a dominant agenda of compliance frames classroom complexities – both in schooling and higher education environments – into fragmented and preconceived responses to challenging situations. Education systems position educators in risk discourses concentrated on compliance and performance, in part through an emphasis that is placed on the diagnosis of learner differences and subsequent compartmentalised responses. Through schisms in modern time, we demonstrate the ways in which inclusion, like other educational demands, may be supported through a diffraction in time rather than subjugated to it.     

Moral education in Hong Kong: Confucian‐parental,Christian‐religious and liberal‐civic influences

A brief review of the social and educational context of Hong Kong shows that the publication of the General guidelines on moral education in schools in 1981, by the Hong Kong Education Department, marked a milestone in the development of moral education. The Guidelines explicitly asserted moral education as one function of schooling, whilst also formally recognizing the home and the community as two main influences. This paper narrates how three moral sources of influence – namely Confucian‐parental, Christian‐religious and liberal‐civic – have shaped the development of moral education in Hong Kong from 1973 to 2003. It then examines in more detail: parental influence at home – the Confucian moral source in Chinese family; schooling influenced by religious sources – taking Christian schools as an example; and the Independent Commission Against Corruption as an official agency for moral education – a liberal source calling for civic morality. In conclusion, the post‐colonial emergence of nationalistic influence in the recently constituted Chinese Special Administrative Region, advocating national identity as the new core value, is traced and the implications for future moral education in Hong Kong are considered.     

Progression in school science curriculum: A rational prospect or a chimera?

Science in schooling has for the first time been recently considered as a verified whole for the 10 or 12 of its compulsory years, rather than for a limited sector of schooling or for a particular group of students. This has also been occurring as part of a wider review and plan for the whole curriculum of schooling. A framework has been provided consisting of a matrix of strands of intended content for learning across a number of levels approximating the years of schooling. There is a sense and expectation of continuous progression in the learning of science. Earlier notions of progression in science curricula are explored and compared with what has now appeared in the national curricula in England and Wales, New Zealand and Australia. The notions of curriculum opportunity and curriculum purpose for science education are introduced as factors that would lead to a shift in the sense of progression from a focus on Science itself to an emphasis on the learners' changing need of Science as they progress through the years of schooling. Specializations: science curriculum, environmental education, equity in education     

论大学生常见心理障碍及疏导办法

作通过对当代大学生的观察、调查和了解，指出了当代大学生较为普遍的存在着不同程度厌学、焦虑、失眠或神经衰弱、失落感、交往恐惧症、抑郁症、强迫症等心理障碍。经过分析，得出了：社会大环境的影响、应试教育体制的影响、家庭教育的影响及大学生自身心理意质较差是形成心理障碍的主要原因。以心理学、生理学为依据，提出了运用自我调适、自我诊治、心理咨询、心理疗法是疏导大学生心理障碍的主要办法。     

Sociology and Music Education: a response to Swanwick

This paper is a response to Professor Swanwick's critique of our sociological perspective on music education. A detailed presentation of the sociology of music thesis demonstrates that accusations of ‘social determinism’ and ‘referentialism’ are both misconceived. Moreover, Swanwick's position leads to difficulties in his approach to music aesthetics, where at times he makes assumptions concerning the work of theorists such as Meyer and Keil which these authors have themselves explicitly repudiated. We then relate certain observations which Swanwick makes concerning the processes of schooling to wider sociological theories of schooling that help make sense of the kinds of constraints Swanwick correctly identifies. Finally, we accept Swanwick's challenge to be more explicit concerning both our response to his charge of relativism and our practical recommendations for the reform of music teaching.     

Stichwort: Bildungsökonomie und Qualität der Schulbildung

Keyword: Education Economics and Quality of Schooling. With reference to an earlier keyword article from the same author, this contribution looks at recent developments in education economics. The focus is a critical review of the field‘s contribution to research on the necessary conditions for high quality schooling. Of particular interest at the moment are the institutional framework conditions in a school system, which set incentives for performance. These are judged to be better than resource-based strategies of quality assurance. The empirical basis is provided by estimates of production functions using data from international school performance studies. This article will point out the limited validity of evidence gained through these studies and the – in sum – contradictory empirical findings. For this reason, political recommendations on the basis of this approach should be more reserved.     

The social field(s) of arts education today: living vulnerability in neo-liberal times

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the ‘real business’ of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a ‘perfect storm’ for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of ‘vulnerability’ as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education – a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment.     

Reframing the universal right to education

The universal right to education has been enshrined in a range of international rights instruments. Yet despite the considerable secondary literature on the subject, there has been little discussion of the notion of education underpinning the right. This article presents a theoretical exploration of the question, leading to a normative reassessment. The article first assesses the expression of the right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, identifying limitations in its focus on primary schooling. Other candidates for a basis for the right – namely learning outcomes and engagement in educational processes – are then assessed, and the latter is found to provide the most coherent foundation. Nevertheless, the positional benefits of formal schooling cannot be ignored. Consequently, a two‐pronged expression of the right is proposed, involving access both to meaningful learning and to institutions that confer positional advantage.     

Mandated team participation: Implications for psychologists working in the schools

Public Law 94-142, Education for All Handicapped Children Act, has had a dramatic impact on the schooling of exceptional children. Yet, rather limited attention has been directed to the one section of the law that mandates a particular decision-making approach for both the diagnosis and intervention tasks. The implications for the training and practice of applied psychologists who work with school-age children could be significant. This paper examines three areas of concern that impact the psychologist's role in working with exceptional children: (a) conditions that are considered crucial for the development of teams, (b) the literature regarding psychologists' input to school-based teams, and (c) reactions of school-based team members to such an approach. Related issues of importance to both trainers and practitioners in the field of psychology are then presented.     

后科举时代:教育身份功能的变化轨迹

科举制的废除并不等于心理层面的身份文化的消失。科举制的长期存在使国人积淀了一种重视考试的“遗传性”和极其浓厚的借助教育获得科名的身份情结。除了毛泽东时代的短暂中断,百年来这一教育身份功能绵绵不绝,挥之不去。考察其变化轨迹,有助于帮助我们解读当今中国的“应试教育”和学历狂热。     

Financing adult learning and education (ALE) now and in future

This article submits that while the world continues to view education as a human right, it also persists in depriving an important section of it – namely adult learning and education (ALE) – of adequate funding. Located within the lifelong learning domain, which facilitates both the resolution of challenges and adjustment to the vagaries of living throughout a lifetime, ALE is indispensable within the framework of the United Nations 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article identifies four factors which are currently responsible for the poor funding of ALE. These factors are: (1) the world’s obsession with the provision of school education; (2) the lack of adequate instruments to work out ALE’s returns on investment; (3) the hope that employers will ultimately supply ALE; and (4) the assumption that an expansion of formal schooling will eventually lead to the establishment of literate societies free of inter-generational crises. Since ALE is generally framed as a broad literacy education project, the author undertakes a review of literacy education costing. This leads him to posit that quality literacy education can be supplied at a unit cost ranging between USD 150 and USD 250 annually within any Global Alliance for Literacy (GAL) country. Finally, the article offers four recommendations to increase ALE funding going forward.

     

研究生学制缩短宜乎慎行

在与国际接轨、提高效率的直接促动下,不少高校尝试将硕士研究生的学制由三年改成两年或更短。面对此等形势,硕士研究生的质量和规格成了一个大大的问号。我们认为研究生学制改革必须与培养方案设计的改革同步进行,而且研究生学制改革方向应实行弹性化区别对行,而不是统一的缩短化倾向,如此才与大众化形势相符。因此针对我国研究生教育的特殊情况,学制缩短的改革举措宜乎慎行。     

我国学龄人口分龄平均受教育年数的计算及其应用研究

学龄人口年龄结构的变化对整个学龄人口的平均受教育年数会产生重要的影响.以与学制和年龄相对应的“标准(或适龄)受教育年数”为基本参数,以受教育程度构成的年龄变化为依据考虑学龄段内的错龄上学,对学龄人口的分龄及整体平均受教育年数的探索性研究结果显示,我国学龄人口的分龄及整体平均受教育年数普遍提高,总体受教育程度高移化趋势显...