Policy Making and Positioning at the Education Agora

• In Event: International large-scale assessments meeting educational policy-making in a restructuring Nordic welfare state.

Proposal

Increasingly over the last decade, international large-scale assessments (ILSA) have come to interact with and be referred to as evidence in political decision-making in many countries. However, to understand these more globalizing change processes we need to look closer at the reformations of national education systems. In this paper, we take Sweden as an example and concentrates on the on years 1990–2017. The aim is to identify different periods in connection with ILSA-policy interactions on the education ‘agora’ and to analyze lines of development in education decision making and policy discourses. Whose knowledge about the school is what matters and on what grounds? The notion of ‘agora’ is here used as “the problem-generating and problem-solving environment in which the contextualization of knowledge production takes place” (Nowotny et al, 2001, p.192). Thus, it is an ‘elastic’ notion that goes beyond being a physical place only (Wycherly, 1956), but embraces institutions and kinds of experts that are involved in production of knowledge about education and the school in periods of restructuring. In that sense, the agora is seen as an intersection of a manifold of often diverging interests and voices, and with no clear institutional and national boundaries, involved in changing structures for production of knowledge about education.
To analyze which actors are present, what arguments are put forward and on what grounds, and implications for education policy making we have carried out interviews with twelve top politicians and other influential top policy actors. These interviews are analyzed in parallel with government policy documents. The inquiry identifies events and actors over time with a focus on epistemic attitudes (von Wright, 1983) as sources of knowledge claims in policy discourses. We illustrate how the education agora increasingly embraces new kinds of actors beyond the sphere of the nation state and sometimes beyond educational institutions, and based on different kinds of knowledge on the education agora, thus creating dissonances in a manifold of voices. These actors are for instance connected to advising in texts from international organizations, judicalization, private for-profit providers of schools, school developers/consultants, controlling education authorities etc. Considering the education agora in Sweden we have identified a shift around the year 2007 when ILSA started be become more influential in education policymaking.
References:
Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2001). Re-thinking science: knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
von Wright, G.H. (1983). Practical reason. Philosophical papers, vol 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wycherly, R. (1956). The market of Athens, topography and monuments. Greece & Rome, 3 (1) 2- 23.

Author

• Gun-Britt Wärvik, Universitu of Gothenburg