The politics of privatisation, decentralisation and education reform in Mexico

Reform in the Mexican education system accords with global patterns of liberalisation, decentralisation, compensatory programs and accountability. The present study analyses reform in that country during the past 15 years. It reveals that despite expectations of change attending the installation of the new government which replaced the ruling party dominant for 70 years, there has been far more continuity than change in educational politics. It also shows that these have been constrained by the militant and powerful National Teachers Union. Although the new government has achieved some progress in equity and management, the quality of education can be seen to remain inferior.     

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.     

Implementing reform amidst resistance: The regulation of teacher education and work in Mexico

Influenced by worldwide globalization forces new structures of control have emerged in Mexico at the school level, and career ladders reward teachers’ compliance with testing and training schemes; nevertheless the long-standing institutions of initial teacher education continue to show a strong resistance to change. Increased accountability is necessary to improve the quality of Mexican education, but a focus on performance and testing may rest legitimacy to indigenous ways of teaching and knowing.     

The politics of knowledge in education

This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and progressive politics in the contemporary period. Limiting the curriculum to experiential knowledge limits access to a powerful class resource; that of conceptual knowledge required for critical reasoning and political agency. Knowledge that comes from experience limits the knower to that experience. The shift to localised knowledge fixes groups in the working class to a never ending present as schools that use a social constructivist approach to knowledge in the curriculum fail to provide the intellectual tools of conceptual thinking and its medium in advanced literacy that lead to an imagined, yet unknown, future.     

The cultural politics of constructivist pedagogies: Teacher education reform in the United Republic of Tanzania

This article examines recent educational reforms in Tanzania by looking at the cultural politics of pedagogical change in secondary and teacher education. It presents an ethnography of a teachers college founded on the principles of social constructivism in a country where formalistic, teacher-centered pedagogy is the norm. Using data collected through a year of participant observation, it argues that the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of teachers’ practice need to be considered alongside efforts to reform the country's educational system. It offers contingent constructivism as an alternative to the international consensus on a single model of excellent teaching.     

The refugee crisis,non-citizens,border politics and education

In the midst of the most serious refugee crisis since WWII, nation states are buttressing their borders. This paper explores the border politics of the nation state in response to the refugee crisis. Drawing on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler and Imogen Tyler it considers the ways in which the imagery of the pain and suffering of Others is deployed to bolster concerns surrounding the sovereignty and safety of the nation state. I suggest the proliferation of ‘non-citizen spaces’, such as refugee detention camps, indicate the need to re-examine the border practices of the nation state amidst contemporary globalisation, and re-consider the limits of popular – and often taken for granted – notions of ‘global citizenship’ in education research and practice. This involves, I contend, understanding concepts and practices of migration, transition and the global as mediated in and through the fortification of nation state borders.     

The politics of education policy in England

In this appreciative discussion paper I provide an overview of the reforms made to education in England, and engage with the politics of education through examining the simultaneous and inter-related processes of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation of educational matters. I engage in a discussion of the papers in this special issue through this framework.     

The politics of hope and cynicism in the realization of the vision of the 334 education reform in Hong Kong

According to Fanny Law Fan Chiu-fun, the former Permanent Secretary for Education and Manpower, the most significant education policy in recent years in Hong Kong was undoubtedly the new academic structure commonly known as “334.” As schools, universities, and the community at large seemed to accept the new academic structure in principle, the areas of contention would mostly lie in the timing and details. Sparked by the suicides of two teachers, a wave of unprecedented protests and opposition against the government’s education policy followed, which led to the departure of the former Permanent Secretary for Education and Manpower Fanny Law Fan Chiu-fun and the Secretary for Education and Manpower Arthur Li Kwok- cheung from the education portfolio. This situation suggests that something was wrong with the teachers’ working environment. This article aims to make sense of these discursive events through a critical discourse analysis of the “334” education policy with materials taken from documents, speeches, and press releases published by the government as well as newspaper articles drawn from South China Morning Post, which is a rich source of contested ideas. An eclectic approach is drawn from both “state-centered” and “policy cycle” perspectives synthesized and adopted for this article. Upon this contested terrain in which individual policy actors struggle to achieve the desired political outcomes, the intention of this article is to explore how the state and other interest groups acted, reacted, and interacted in the policy processes of the 334 Education Reform.     

The state,markets and higher education reform in Botswana

Market forces are being introduced in public spheres such as higher education and public health, which hitherto were closed to such forces. Ironically, it is the state that is responsible for this process of marketisation. Some see this state action as leading to a growing influence of the state in public policy while others see an attenuation of its role. Critiquing this market–state incompatibility thesis from a geo-spatial perspective on globalisation, this paper calls for an articulation of state–market relations that emphasises their interpenetration. Using Botswana as a case study, the paper argues that although on-going tertiary education reforms in the country are characterised by the state's promotion of market forces this does not mean that the state is retreating, leaving the sub-sector to the vagaries of the market. Contrarily, the state is employing marketisation to reform the sub-sector so that it is responsive to labour and skills demands of an economy aspiring to be knowledge-based.     

The modernisation of higher education in Mexico

Following the Second World War, higher education in Mexico began a series of fundamental changes that taken together, altered the profile of the traditional university. It developed into a system which in its academic, social and political functions became highly complex as well as diverse, given the variety of institutional options and professional development schemes.The transition took place both at the institutional level and was system wide. The former was accompanied by expansion in the organisation as a whole. It involved updating the curriculum and the overhaul of administrative, managerial and planning mechanisms. At the latter level, the most significant change involved reforming the major component parts; the territorial distribution of access to education, and carried across the various fields of knowledge and disciplines, bore down on the level and allocation of different funding sources. These developments are best analysed within the perspective context of academic diversification and differentiation.     

Higher education privatisation,internationalisation and marketisation: Singaporean versus Malaysian models of Asian education hub policy

The metaphor of an ‘education hub’ was initially promoted as also a policy concept for reversing cross-border student flows to the West in both Malaysia and Singapore. The Singapore version of ‘Asian education hub policy’ represents a distinct economic policy model of higher education which has since also influenced the very Western contexts it was derived from. However, it appears the Singaporeans might have actually borrowed the policy concept from the Malaysians whose aspirations to reverse international student flows to the West was rather aligned to related national capacity development plans as still something of a public good. This paper will use a Malaysia-Singapore contrast to compare distinct developing country (national/regional) vs. developed country (globalised) conceptions of the Asian education hub model. On this exemplary basis, it will also outline an integrated framework to better make sense of the related yet also often conflicting imperatives of privatization, internationalization and marketization.     

论现代教育技术在教育改革中的作用

当前现代科技手段已经越来越多的运用到教育改革中,现代教育技术作为一门迅速发展的学科,在现代的教育教学中发挥了重要作用。现代教育技术在教学内容、教学方式、教学组织、教学模式等方面的变革和创新是传统教学无法相比的,因此具有强大的发展潜力。