The cultural conditions of national education reform, 1970-2016

• In Event: Reformism: the rise and effects of national education reform, 1970-2016

Proposal

In this paper, I seek to question the conventional wisdom that education reform is an inherent feature of education systems by drawing on a new cross-national, longitudinal dataset on the number of education reform in 135 countries over the period 1970-2016. The dominant explanation for education reform put forth by researchers and policymakers is that it is a consequence of rational action (or its failures). Often the impetus is technical: classic research shows, for example, that policymakers often learn the wrong lessons from the past and thus need to repeat reforms in the same domain (Katz 1987). Others emphasize that politics shape decision-makers: This can distort rational action (Slavin 1989). As a recent example, Finger (2018) shows that political interest groups (teachers unions) can dampen reform diffusion, conditional on unsympathetic policymakers. Resource dependencies also matter: At the international level Official Development Assistance (ODA) may “generate or alleviate pressure to reform” (Steiner-Khamsi 2010: 331). Overall, these arguments emphasize rational action either in terms of a technical goal, a political one, and/or a response to power and resources. But these arguments shed little light on why education reform itself becomes framed as under the control of rational activities. In contrast, I develop a cultural account that ties the rise of reform to deeply held assumptions that education is a generalizable and standardizable activity that can be controlled through rational human action; these assumptions stem especially from neoliberal cultural ideologies about the ascendency of the individual.

Author

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University