Understanding business interests in international large-scale student assessments: a media analysis of The Economist,Financial Times,and Wall Street Journal

The media analysis is situated in the larger body of studies that explore the varied reasons why different policy actors advocate for international large-scale student assessments (ILSAs) and adds to the research on the fast advance of the global education industry. The analysis of The Economist, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal covers publications on ‘PISA’, ‘TIMSS’, and related search items over the period 1996–2016. The three media outlets vary in terms of ILSA reporting. The Economist and Financial Times tend to focus on PISA, whereas the Wall Street Journal pays greater attention to TIMSS than PISA. The content analysis of 59 articles yields interesting results about how the business-oriented readership of the three media outlets frames public education and why it sees education as a profitable business opportunity. The three most common narratives, reflecting the business logic, are the following: (i) public education is in crisis; (ii) there is no correlation between spending and education outcome; and (iii) school accountability, teacher performance, and decentralisation represent the most effective policies to improve the quality of education. Drawing on these three common narratives, the financial media outlets present a particular vision of how to improve education; a vision in which the private sector is supposed to play a major role.     

Boundary spanners,network capital and the rise of edu-businesses: the case of News Corporation and its emerging education agenda

This paper provides a critical analysis of News Corporation and argues that through the acquisition of high profile policy actor, Joel Klein, News Corporation has been able to assemble significant network capital to position itself as an entity apparently responsible for the public good and with a role to play in public policymaking. My aim in this paper was to document and analyse how the contexts of policy influence in education are evolving through the involvement of multinational edu-businesses and the quasi-privatisation of the education policy community globally. I analyse the place of education in News Corporation’s current business strategy as exemplary of the changing role that businesses are playing in education policy processes nationally and globally and argue that we are seeing the emergence of powerful new policy actors. This analysis is set against the emerging literature that seeks to analyse the increasing influence of edu-businesses on education policy processes and locates these developments within considerations of changing educational governance structures, new privatisations and public–private partnerships in education. It is argued that boundary spanners like Klein with their intimate ‘inside knowledge’ of state structures are mobilising network capital to frame policy problems and advocate policy solutions in ways that are attractive to education policymakers while also being commercially beneficial to News Corporation and their shareholders.     

How International Large-Scale Skills Assessments engage with national actors: mobilising networks through policy,media and public knowledge

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how international, large-scale skills assessments (ILSAs) engage with the broader societies they seek to serve and improve. It looks particularly at the discursive work that is done by different interest groups and the media through which the findings become part of public conversations and are translated into usable form in policy arenas. The paper discusses how individual countries are mobilised to participate in international surveys, how the public release of findings is managed and what is known from current research about how the findings are reported and interpreted in the media. Research in this area shows that international and national actors engage actively and strategically with ILSAs, to influence the interpretation of findings and subsequent policy outcomes. However, these efforts are indeterminate and this paper argues that it is at the more profound level of the public imagination of education outcomes and of the evidence needed to know about these that ILSAs achieve their most totalising effects.     

Teacher-Advocates Respond to ESSA: “Support the Good Parts—Resist the Bad Parts”

Although researchers consider them powerful, teacher policy advocates are among the least studied stakeholders in U.S. public education reform today. Although plenty of attention has been given to the impact of policy on teachers' work, little research explores how teachers interpret or interact with policy. Drawing on the work of Spillane, Reiser, and Reimer (2002) on teachers' policy implementation and Coburn's (2001) work on teachers' collective sense-making of policy, this qualitative study examines the different ways in which five teachers interpreted, translated, and enacted a response to ESSA. The findings describe how contextual factors influence teachers' relationship with education policy: (a) structural supports for grassroots involvement via social networks are instrumental in mobilizing teachers, and (b) unless a more bottom-up approach is taken that enables teacher agency, sense-making, and advocacy, top-down school policies will continue to hold limited promise. The paper concludes with implications for understanding how teachers are indeed policy advocates.     

The Role of Partnership in Shaping the Diversity Agenda

This study examines how external stakeholders, collaborators, and partners help shape the diversity agenda in post-secondary education. Results from a comparative case study analysis of four professional schools (public health, business, social work and engineering) at a large American research university suggest that external social actors are influential in stimulating diversity-related activity and determining how post-secondary organizations address pressures, expectations, demands, requirements and incentives related to diversity.

     

Clarifying and reframing the neoliberal critique of educational policy using policy process theories

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the vocabulary and frameworks offered by two theories of public policy process: the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) and the narrative policy framework (NPF) and what they offer to the study of global education reform. The foci of ACF are policy subsystems, formation of advocacy coalitions around policy issues, and their impact on policy change; the emphasis of NPF is the divergent narratives developed and used by these coalitions. This paper reviews each theoretical framework, summarizes existing research literature on their education policy applications, and then poses alternative questions and suggest alternatives to study global education policies, especially those presently critiqued using the term neoliberal which we position as nebulous in its current usage. The aim is to open channels of communication for scholars from different disciplines by introducing different theoretical approaches to analyse the role of the numerous elements that shape global education policy.     

A changed language of education with new actors and solutions: the authorization of promotion and prevention programmes in Swedish schools

This article demonstrates how changes in the language of Swedish education policy have opened up a new social perception of education, in which space has been created for new actors, models and solutions in terms of managing activities in schools. Specifically, it seeks to illustrate how various promotion and prevention programmes have been authorized and disseminated without critical inquiry or resistance in the education sector. To this end, we analyse how the specific, essentially contested concepts of health, value base and communication have been employed in authoritative national documents over the two last decades. For our analysis, we draw on speech act theory, with a focus on linguistic performativity, as we have been interested in analysing how concrete authoritative actors have ‘performed’ various arguments. The analysis helps us to understand how the linguistic force originating from authoritative agencies can be used by different actors as a way to legitimize their arguments and actions. The results demonstrate how different national authorities, as a consequence of their use of the three concepts analysed, have contributed to the establishment of promotion and prevention programmes in education.     

Internationalization of higher education in the crucible: Linking national identity and policy in the age of globalization

Nationalism’s rise represents a potential harbinger of doom for the internationalization of higher education (IoHE). Space exists for research to amplify our understanding of the interplay between internationalization and nationalism from a public policy theory perspective. The study identified and classified policies and policy ideas pertinent to IoHE, and furthermore, explored how political rivalries in Taiwan have influenced IoHE’s development under globalization. Analysis of documentary data from an online national database reveals how IoHE policy changes reflect the machinations of political actors to advance domestic political agendas and provoke controversy. The advocacy coalition framework informs our explanation of how the aforementioned changes reflect Taiwan’s inward-looking political climate, unique geopolitical circumstances, and longstanding controversy over national identity. The paper discusses the implications of context for IoHE development across three consecutive government regimes to provide insights for further comparisons with other localities and contexts.     

The evolution of the student as a customer in Australian higher education: a policy perspective

In 2014, the Australian Federal Government attempted to de-regulate higher education fees so as to allow universities to set their own tuition fees. The associated public debate offer critical insights into how the identity of a student as a ‘customer’ of higher education is understood and deployed when developing higher education policy. This paper uses the 2014 Australian higher education reforms as a lens through which to further scholarly research into the student-as-customer metaphor and to see how it is influenced by the perceptions and understandings of policy actors external to the higher education sector. These include politicians, special interest groups, the students and their parents and prospective employers. This study reveals that the public/private nexus—both of funding and benefit—problematizes traditional conceptualisations of students and others as higher education customers. In turn, this restricts the ability or desire of policy actors to describe how the student functions as a customer as a consequence of market reform. This inability compromises the development of effective and sustainable higher education policy.     

The Role of Partnership in Shaping the Diversity Agenda

This study examines how external stakeholders, collaborators, and partners help shape the diversity agenda in post‐secondary education. Results from a comparative case study analysis of four professional schools (public health, business, social work and engineering) at a large American research university suggest that external social actors are influential in stimulating diversity‐related activity and determining how post‐secondary organizations address pressures, expectations, demands, requirements and incentives related to diversity.     

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.     

Language,discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’

This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characterised by an overt focus on standardised English and behaviour ‘management’. In a grounded approach, I explore how the disciplining of language correlates with the disciplining of the body, based on ethnographic-orientated fieldwork undertaken in a London secondary school and drawing on a broad range of policy mechanisms such as curricula, textbooks, classroom artefacts and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion industry. I show how the current linguistic conservatism found within government policy gets reproduced in school-level policies, pedagogies and classroom interactions, and highlight these relations within a network of policy actors and key terms associated with so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ and ‘no-excuses’ schools. I show how teachers are positioned as language policy managers who work within a system of surveillance, compliance, coercion and control. As such, this article contributes to current thinking within critical language policy and the sociology of education by offering an expanded view of language ideologies in schools, whereby connections between language and discipline are explicitly illustrated and critiqued.     

Think tanks,education and elite policy actors

The past decade has seen think tanks operate in sophisticated ways to influence the development of education policies. In this paper, I reflect upon the influence of think tanks in the formation of national reform, using the Common Core State Standards initiative in the USA as an illustrative case. In doing so, I explore how certain think tanks, headed by political elites and backed by significant philanthropic funding, have sought to influence the reform initiative. My central argument is that meanings and practices associated with political publics are being transformed as elite policy actors gain influence. Through mobilising significant political and economic power, elites work through think tanks to influence policy debates, re-frame policy problems and advocate for particular policy solutions. The new public formations that are resulting appear to be shifting the conditions of possibility for policy making in education.     

The reconstruction of Palestinian education: between history,policy politics andpolicy making

This paper reflects on the key actors in education policy making in Zimbabwe. It looks at the contextual complexities that characterized policy-making in this country to make sense of the contestations that the state had to confront and accommodate. The policy network approach is employed as an analytical framework to clarify how, in particular non-state actors, have had an impact (or not) on educational governance through influences on policy. Policy documents, research reports and the reactions of non-state actors to these aspects are examined to explore the impact of the latter on policy making. The significant roles of the various policy networks are also given attention to establish how they have affected the reconfiguration of the state. The argument developed is that in spite of the ostensibly strong state, education policy formulation has been a product of compromise between policy networks and the predilections of those in office. As a political and contested enterprise it had to accommodate both local and international concerns.     

Only a Matter of Education Policy Ideals? German Professors’ Perception of the Bologna Process

Recently, it has been discussed how actors at universities perceive the Bologna Process. However, there is a lack of understanding about the determinants influencing attitudes towards the reform. In particular, the relation between education policy ideals and perceptions of the Bologna Process has gone unobserved. Based on a survey at three universities in North Rhine‐Westphalia in Germany, this article shows that a congruence of education policy ideals with the goals of the Bologna Process leads to a more positive perception of the reform. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models show that these findings are stable when controlled for socio‐demographic characteristics, changes of everyday work and involvement in the implementation of the Bologna Process. Thus, it is worthwhile to take into account the education policy ideals of involved actors when analysing perceptions of educational reforms.     

Socialisation,learning and the OECD’s Reviews of National Policies for Education: the case of Sweden

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) education policy work of the last 20 years has achieved a paradigmatic shift in the thinking and framing of education; however, this process was not exclusively based and dependent upon the cold rationality of numbers. Crucially, as the article will show, it has also involved processes of socialisation and learning. The paper argues that a constructivist-institutionalist perspective based on the notion of socialisation provides adequate tools to explain the dominance of the OECD in the education policymaking world. The paper makes use of policy learning theory to show how and why it is the coming together of various actors in social terms that sustains and reinforces the numbers game, rather than simply the validity or strength of the numbers themselves. It uses the case of the publication of the OECD Review of Swedish education in 2015 to empirically flesh out the argument. Although the influence of the OECD has been great to a number of countries, Sweden is perhaps one of the few that displays such unanimity of public opinion and the academic and policymaking worlds in regard to the indispensability of the OECD as an education policy expert and actor.     

National innovation policy and public science in Australia

In this paper, I have positioned myself with Kean Birch and explored some of the political-economic actors/actants of policy suites implicated in the biotechnologies and bioeconomy. In particular, I have considered Australia’s recent National Innovation and Science Agenda and allied documents and entities (that is, Innovation and Science Australia, the National Science Statement and the 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap) as one of the National Innovation Strategies in place now in OECD countries and beyond. In overview, these policy suites utilise the same high knowledge creation/low translation and commericalisation arguments as elsewhere to press for particular ideologically based ‘improvements’ to public science. Mapping the terrain of these entities has revealed the innovation, biotechnology and bioeconomy policy space to be inordinately complex and challenging to navigate. Reviewing Australia’s position enables the type of comparative work that contributes to a closer understanding of the largely neoliberal global economic imperatives shaping contemporaneity. Moreover, while these policy suites attempt to constitute and circulate particular visions of science education, their complex nature mitigates against science teachers/educators grappling with their implications.     

The university,democracy and the public sphere

This article takes a historical approach to the rise and fall of the public university, relating its fate to specific developments in public policy. Particular attention will be paid to the United Kingdom since it has developed an explicit drive towards the marketization of higher education in the context of an earlier commitment to public higher education, although the latter was initially first developed in the United States. Both countries are typically characterized as liberal policy regimes and therefore the article considers how wider social structures are implicated in recent changes to higher education. In particular, the article addresses how the functions of the university and its corporate form are being transformed and relates this to wider developments in the nature of the corporation and the relation between business and citizenship (or market and democracy).     

Contesting education policy in the public sphere: media debates over policies for the Queensland school curriculum

This paper investigates the work of media discourses on education policy in public debates over the Queensland school curriculum. It draws on theories of discourse, theories that have recently influenced the field of policy sociology, to outline a conceptualization of policy and media texts as discourses in the public sphere. In so doing, it notes the significant contribution such public discourses on education make to the policy process. The paper employs critical discourse analysis to investigate the discursive constructions of curriculum during one particular policy initiative. The analysis focuses on newspaper debates over the inclusion of a subject called Health and Physical Education (HPE) in the Queensland secondary school curriculum. The paper shows how educational policy issues were discursively constituted and contested through the construction of public discourses on education policy. In particular, it demonstrates how such public discourses worked to construct authoritative voices on educational policy. The paper concludes with a call to teachers and policymakers to seek opportunities to construct an authoritative public voice on issues of education policy.     

Governance Dynamics and the Application of the Multilevel Governance Approach in Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the European Neighbourhood Countries: the case of the ENPI South region

This article analyses moves towards good multilevel governance approaches in Vocational Education and Training (VET) as an effective way to improve VET policy making in transition and developing countries, focusing on the Southern Neighbourhood of the EU (ENPI South). The centralised approaches in public administration and to VET governance still prevail in this region. The new modes of governance applied by the EU in the policy area of education and training are based on the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). They are a source of inspiration to improve VET governance, taking into account the complexity of VET policies and systems. According to current European and international experiences, the most effective, relevant and attractive VET models and systems are demand‐driven. They rely on the effective and accountable participation of both state (national/local public actors) and non‐state VET stakeholders (e.g. employers, sectoral actors, unions) in decision‐making and policy implementation processes. This could also pave the way towards self‐governed and performance‐based VET provider institutions which would give quicker responses to rapidly changing labour market skills, competences and qualification needs. Thus, this means putting in practice more and better inclusion and effective cooperation and coordination of regional and local voices of VET actors and developing stronger social partnerships to engage employers, unions and civil society in shaping and investing in skills development. Furthermore, the role of methodological tools for VET governance is not only to provide an analytical ground to capture data and structure further policy advice. These tools can also be used as ice‐breakers to improve collaboration, inclusiveness, multi‐participation and trust‐building among policy makers as they work together on very sensitive issues such as reviewing country VET governance models, modes and institutional arrangements, and/or planning policy thinking and/or learning for implementing coordination mechanisms for VET policy making. The European Training Foundation (ETF) has implemented a methodology to map, analyse and self‐assess good multilevel governance in VET, inspired by how EU governance soft tools in education and training are being used. This methodology has been applied to the Governance for Employability in the Mediterranean (GEMM) project in the ENPI South region, which is a regional project implemented by the ETF and financed by the European Commission's Directorate General for Neighbourhood and Enlargements Negotiations (NEAR).