‘Quality revolution’ in post-Soviet education in Russia: from control to assurance?

Employing the analytical framework of a discourse-driven social change, this paper unpacks the neoliberal concept of ‘educational quality’ in the course of Russian education modernisation reform from 1991 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the global neoliberal discourse has served as the backbone for post-Soviet educational ideology. Alongside other major reform initiatives, the ‘quality revolution,’ proclaimed by the Russian Government in the early 1990s, signified a rhetoric shift away from the Soviet-era quality control towards a neoliberal quality assurance paradigm. Through fine-grained textual analysis of policy documents and political statements by key educational stakeholders, the analysis unpacks the discursive underbelly of the new quality paradigm, in an attempt to determine whether a paradigmatic transformation has taken place. The paper argues that despite the nominally proclaimed shift towards a quality assurance model of educational governance, the representation of educational stakeholders and responsibilities within the new quality paradigm continues to correspond to the Soviet-era command-and-control authoritarian model. The study challenges the popular claim of a neoliberal turn in Russian education and suggests that a neoconservative authoritarian approach to education governance has been smuggled in under the disguise of ‘quality assurance.’     

Continuing Inequity through Neoliberalism: The Conveyance of White Dominance in the Educational Policy Speeches of President Barack Obama

The purpose of this critical discourse analysis is to examine how the political speeches and statements of President Barack Obama knowingly or unknowingly continue practices and policies of White privilege within educational policy and practice by constructing education in a neoliberal frame. With presidents having the ability to communicate unencumbered with their citizens, the impact of Presidential communication can either set or rupture the status quo. President Obama, as the first non-White President of the United States of America, is now at the center of continuing or breaking the status quo in educational policy which has been historically harmful to racial minorities. Through this critical discourse analysis studying the statements and remarks of President Obama in seven speeches pertaining to pk-12 education, there was evidence that suggested President Obama maintains the status quo. This paper argues that President Obama views education as a neoliberal enterprise, with its main focus on education serving economic purposes. Such a view reinforces racial stratification throughout society. Other evidence suggests that President Obama also reinforces individualistic approaches concerning race which could serve to further embed the institutional and internalized racism in public education. This research can serve to continue and strengthen educational discussions of the impact of whiteness and racism on public education. While steps are continually taken to ensure legal equality, generational and institutionalized measures are often ignored when discussing race and racism. This research can provide for further conversations on the impact that leaders have on continuing and promoting aspects of racism to their constituents.     

Education and poverty in affluent countries

This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education institutions of the post-war welfare state are often characterised as being lost, attacked, encroached upon and dismantled. In this paper, I contend it is important to avoid mobilising a memory of public educational pasts that do not account for their failings and inequalities. Turning to a historical engagement with the emergence of neoliberal politics, the paper explores how challenges and contestations surrounding ‘the public’ from multiple standpoints converged in the rise of neoliberalism. Recognition of these convergences and contestations, I suggest, assists to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between neoliberal reform and the welfare state, and thus of the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a just and equitable public education.     

Sociology of Education: Outlines Towards a Diagnosis and Thoughts on Some Major Challenges

Sociology of education in Norway has traditionally been preoccupied with the classic problems related to education and the reproduction of social inequality. As the general social scientific and political focus on inequality decreased, the sociology of education also became less visible. At the same time, the sociology of youth evolved, and brought with it a shift from theories of reproduction towards theories of individualization and cultural detachment. New challenges for sociology of education are also discussed. These are related to the educational system's position as the main socialization arena for young people, as well as new developments within educational policy, and thus within school. What kind of identities are “produced” within the educational system?     

The politics of languages in education: issues of access,social participation and inequality in the multilingual context of Pakistan

This paper, based on some findings of a wider three‐year study, sets forth the issue of languages used and taught in education as a dimension of inequality and highlights its implications for widening participation and access in the multilingual context of Pakistan. The paper takes secondary education in private and government schools in Pakistan as a point of departure, and through themes that emerge from a qualitative multiple‐case studies account of 32 participants (final year graduating students and their same‐sex five‐ to six‐years older siblings) explores issues of inequality with reference to Amertya Sen's capability approach and Pierre Bourdieu's social critical theory. The findings revealed that the concurrent processes of (a) hegemony of English; (b) its discriminatory distribution through schooling; and (c) devaluation of local languages, led by the language policy and mediated through educational institutions, diminished the transformative impact of education in expanding opportunities for widening participation and access. Issues of inequality continue to haunt the underprivileged despite their secondary education. The paper highlights the importance of considering the political economy of languages chosen and taught in formal education as a means of evaluating social justice in educational contexts and considering languages in education decisions with reference to national language policy.     

The Swedish schoolhouse: a case study in transnational influences in education at the 1870s world fairs

At the world exhibitions of the 1870s Sweden displayed a schoolhouse, with examples of teaching material and student work. How did Sweden ship an entire schoolhouse to these exhibitions? What impact did the schoolhouse have on visitors to the exhibition? The purpose of this article is to shed light on the transnational influences operating between Sweden and other countries at the world fairs of the 1870s, regarding both policy and practice formation. In this paper, we will explore the exhibited school, the Swedish schoolhouse, as a major political and educational intervention in the growing market of educational goods, into the group of advanced industrial nations, and into the space of leading education nations. The schoolhouse was internally focused while at the same time demonstrating advanced education thinking, closely linked to Sweden’s national future as a leading economy. Exhibitions were not just events or spectacles. They had effects.     

A systematic literature review of K-12 environmental Citizen Science (CS) initiatives: Unveiling the CS pedagogical and participatory aspects contributing to students’ environmental citizenship

Environmental Citizen Science (CS) initiatives have been largely embraced in K-12 education, as they are often hypothesized to improve students' knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours to act as “environmental citizens” according to the notion of Environmental Citizenship (EC). However, the potential of environmental CS initiatives to promote Education for Environmental Citizenship (EEC) has not been systematically explored. At the same time, environmental CS initiatives for educational purposes are highly heterogenous and learning is enacted in diverse ways, according to the participatory and the pedagogical components underpinning each initiative. To address the complexity of the field, this review study adopts the PRISMA methodology to synthesize thirty-four empirical studies (n = 34) retrieved from a systematic review of the literature covering the last two decades (2000–2020). The reviewed environmental CS initiatives were subjected to a content analysis to identify their impact on students' EC (e.g., EC competences, actions, outcomes), as well as to unveil the CS initiatives' constitutional components in terms of (a) Participation (e.g., types of students' contributions, level of data collection, frequency of students' participation, modes of student engagement, forms of students’ involvement), and (b) Pedagogy (e.g., learning goals, educational contexts, learning mechanisms, EEC pedagogy). Our analysis shed light to the three territories (Participation, Pedagogy, Environmental Citizenship) underpinning the reviewed CS initiatives as well as to their interrelations. We reflect on these findings, and we provide directions for future research to guide the development of more successful environmental CS initiatives in K-12 education, serving as a vehicle for EC.     

The private problem with public service: rural teachers in educational markets

Staffing rural and remote schools is an important policy issue for the public good. This paper examines the private issues it also poses for teachers with families working in these communities, as they seek to reconcile careers with educational choices for children. The paper first considers historical responses to staffing rural and remote schools in Australia, and the emergence of neoliberal policy encouraging marketisation of the education sector. We report on interviews about considerations motivating household mobility with 11 teachers across regional, rural and remote communities in Queensland. Like other middle-class parents, these teachers prioritised their children's educational opportunities over career opportunities. The analysis demonstrates how teachers in rural and remote communities constitute a special group of educational consumers with insider knowledge and unique dilemmas around school choice. Their heightened anxieties around school choice under neoliberal policy are shown to contribute to the public issue of staffing rural and remote schools.     

Neoliberalism and curriculum in higher education: a post-colonial analyses

In an era of internationalisation and globalisation, neoliberal agendas have now become important aspects of many institutional and national governments’ higher education policy. A major aspect of these neoliberal agendas is their impact on the curriculum. This paper critically examines the impact of neoliberal agendas on curriculum through a postcolonial and decolonising lens, drawing on research conducted in the African context to illuminate the theoretical analysis presented. Drawing on 48 semi-structured interviews and documentary analyses across three public universities in Ghana, we examine the relationship between neoliberal agendas, neo-colonialism and curriculum imperatives in African higher education. The analysis illuminates the ways that hegemonic discourses connected to neoliberal agendas re-privilege Western-oriented values and perspectives and impact the curriculum changes in African higher education institutions.     

Where Soviet and neoliberal discourses meet: the transformation of the purposes of higher education in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

This paper studies transformations in the role of higher education in Russia as represented in official Soviet and post-Soviet policy documents between the 1950s and 2013. The focus is on the categories defining the purposes and tasks of higher education in the larger context of society and economy. There is a basic dichotomy in relation to the purposes and role of higher education, between vocational training (which is seen as a determining factor in the economic development) and personal development/education (seen as a condition of social development). The balance of these two poles, economic instrumentalism and social instrumentalism, changes throughout the history. The Soviet documents emphasized the importance of both, with the predominance of the social instrumentalism. The transitional period of the late 1980s and early 1990s is characterized by increasing humanistic discourse in regard to higher education. Later post-Soviet documents, reflecting neoliberal policies, largely abandon social instrumentalism and more exclusively promote the economic role of higher education. Economic instrumentalism is the meeting point of two historical eras, with their respective ideologies and political agendas. Connecting Soviet and neoliberal discourses highlights the importance of historical legacies in regard to the economic, applied nature of higher education, and underlines the crucial role of the state, which facilitated acceptance of neoliberal agendas in Russian society. The analysis also contributes to further understanding of the nature of the neoliberal reforms globally and in post-socialist countries.     

The imagined community of sexually liberal citizens: educational reforms since the 1970s

Recent integration discourses in Europe locate problems of equality, gender, and sexuality among migrant youth. Educating and testing the values of future citizens is supposed to guarantee their conformity with ‘western’ and ‘modern’ values. By analyzing educational reform discourses in multicultural Luxembourg, the paper aims to challenge these contemporary narratives in two ways: (1) In a historical analysis, the paper traces conservative reform resistance in the case of sex education which is often overlooked due to the focus on migrants; (2) In placing sex education’s reform legitimation and resistance within (a) broader educational reform discourses of inequality and citizenship and (b) contemporary narrations of the reforms and their taboos, the paper reconstructs how liberals and conservatives join an alliance over sexuality education of ‘the Other’. The sociological–historical discourse analysis critically questions the ethnicization of sexuality by disclosing its homogenizing use to cover conservative resistance within the citizen’s community.     

Voluntarily exiled? Korean state’s cultural politics of young adults’ social belonging and Korean students’ exile to a US community college

This study examines the complicated interlink between the Korean state’s neoliberal identity politics and working- and lower middle-class Korean students’ study abroad as a form of voluntarily exile. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis and a 14-month ethnographic study, this study discusses how these students’ decisions to study abroad are inextricably intertwined with the authoritarian Korean state’s neoliberal political-economic strategies of pushing out seemingly less-profitable citizens (namely, students and graduates of low-ranking 4-year institutions). This study also examines students’ strategies for simultaneously resisting and conforming to this neoliberal ethos. For working-class and lower middle-class Korean community college students, study abroad means a deviation from the normal educational and life trajectories in Korea while, at the same time, their education in the USA opens a pathway for reentering the Korean neoliberal system as more profitable citizens. Their being recognized as members of a profitable workforce indicates their achievement of neoliberal normalcy.     

New generation’s career aspirations and new ways of marginalization in a postindustrial economy

The 1990s, a decade of democratic advances and consumption euphoria in South Korea, heralded a new wind called ‘neoliberal education’. It is within this historical juncture that I conducted an ethnographic research on low‐income youths who had dropped out of mainstream high schools. While I investigated these youths’ educational and career aspirations, I examined how discourses in neoliberal freedom and free marketization shape (and are shaping) these youths’ self‐fashioning. Central to my analysis is how this process of identity construction is intersected with class marginality. A predominate number of youths in my research express their preference in service sector and/or entertainment industries. The paper addresses how neoliberal discourses and consumerism ;rhetoric are negotiated and transformed in youth’s narratives on aspirations. The analysis speaks to the ideological pitfall of neoliberalism, echoing critical scholars’ thesis that neoliberalistic education with free market principles perpetuated and broadened existing inequalities.     

Views from the blackboard: neoliberal education reforms and the practice of teaching in Ontario,Canada

This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each other on issues of managerialism, privatisation and punitive accountability mechanisms. Both schoolteachers and adult educators made references to a reduction in autonomy and to an emerging ‘culture of fear’ in educational institutions and programmes. The experience of teachers highlights contradictions between the promises of neoliberalism and the ground-level impact of policy.     

World Bank in Nepal’s education: three decades of neoliberal reform

This paper critically analyses key educational policy documents produced by the World Bank mainly from the mid-1980s to 2010 with regard to implementing major educational projects in Nepal. Using critical policy sociology as a methodological tool, the paper explores how a small Himalayan nation with per capita income of about US$730 (2014) plunged into neoliberal world order during the early 1980s. The paper argues that Bank’s educational policy recommendations are guided by some underlying assumptions of neoliberalism mainly marketisation, privatisation, and decentralisation. The paper concludes that neoliberal orientation in education has almost no potential in addressing Nepal’s development challenges.     

Bringing Disability Into the Discussion: Examining Technology Accessibility as An Equity Concern in the Field of Instructional Technology

This article presents a review of the literature, pertaining to technology accessibility in K–12 schools in the United States, in order to bring technology accessibility into conversations about equity in instructional technology with the goal of ensuring that disabled learners have equal access to the technology-enhanced learning opportunities that are an increasingly integral part of K–12 education. The findings of the review indicate that despite long-standing federal and state accessibility mandates, inaccessible technologies abound in K–12, denying disabled learners equal access to education. We conclude that technology accessibility is an equity concern that must be prioritized in instructional technology discourse, research, and practice to begin addressing the inequality that disabled learners face in technology-enhanced K–12 learning environments. (Keywords: instructional technology, equity, disability, accessibility, K–12, education)     

The Use of Mobile Learning in Grades K–12: A Literature Review of Current Trends and Practices

ABSTRACT

This article presents a literature review of mobile learning (m-learning) in the K–12 classroom and explores the impact of tablets in primary education. Additionally, it shows the impact of mobile learning on K–12 online learning as well as the need for professional development of educators utilizing mobile technologies. Further, the article reviews challenges with m-learning and provides potential recommendations and guidelines for utilizing mobile technologies in the future of educational curriculum development.     

Group-based educational inequalities in India: Have major education policy interventions been effective?

Despite seven decades of policy thrust, group-based educational inequalities persist in India. The tenacious social group-based stratification often proves to be a hurdle for educational participation policies to be effectively rolled out. Given these realities, this study reviews all major national education policy interventions since t 1950s. Using four rounds of National Sample Survey (NSS) data, we analysed the pattern of educational attainments in terms of Average Years of Schooling (AYS) and educational inequalities in India for the period 1994-2012. Three indices of inequality - Gini, Theil’s enttropy and Atkinson - have been constructed to study inequality by gender, place of residence and social groups. . We also empirically estimated the determinants of educational attainments in India by using OLS and Tobit Models. Further using the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition technique, we analysed the educational attainment gaps between groups. The study concludes that policy interventions have done little to reduce the group-based educational attainment gap and it’s time to place improved focus on secondary and higher education while continuing the efforts in primary education.     

The new articulation of equity education in neoliberal times: the changing conception of social justice in Ontario

In this paper, we draw attention to the impact of neoliberal globalisation in rearticulating conceptions of equity within the Ontario context. The Ontario education system has been hailed for its top performance on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a high-equity/high-quality education system and created ‘PISA envy’ in the international context. Our aim in this paper is to provide some critical analysis of the neoliberal rationality and to examine its manifestations for rearticulating conceptions of social justice. Drawing on equity education policies in Ontario and one in-depth interview with an equity practitioner in one of Ontario’s large and most diverse school boards, this paper illustrates how a redefinition of equity has been made possible through neoliberal systems of accountability and performativity involving measurement and facticity. As a result of these strategies, equity policy in education has been concerned with outcome measurement and boys’ underachievement, while racial and class inequalities have become invisible. While this paper is focused on Ontario equity policy, we believe that it serves much broader interest given the current context of global education policy field.     

Educating child practitioners: a (re)turn to the university disciplines

This paper analyses a specific disjunctive policy space in Scotland involving the current key children's social and educational policy agenda, Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC), and a recent national report on teacher education, the ‘Donaldson Report’. In four main parts, the paper first introduces and applies in policy review and analysis a capitals frame to identify the policy–practice discontinuities currently inherent in the ‘GIRFEC-child practitioner education’ policy space, exemplified by the Donaldson Report. Then, the same capitals frame is applied to examine the capitals resources demanded in the particular ‘child–child practitioner education’ policy space previously delineated. Next, examples of policy disconnects amongst current child practice and practitioner education policy production and implementation, which warrant a concerted integrative cross-sector project to ensure coherent social and intellectual capital relations at all levels, are discussed. Finally, the paper calls for the governing professional registration bodies and universities involved in the education of child-sector practitioners to engage in the redesign of university programmes underpinned by principles of transdisciplinarity and transprofessionalism. The methodology is policy sociology and policy text analysis.