Learn from Whom? A Comparison of the Cross-National Attraction of Basic Education among Finland, Singapore and China

• In Event: Dialogue and Cooperation in Educational Transformation for a Sustainable Future

Proposal

Policy borrowing has become the primary approach to education reform in many countries worldwide. Educational authorities in different countries are "looking abroad", searching for "reference societies" or "target countries" internationally and borrowing their "best practices" to carry out education system reform. As Paul Morris (2012) notes, the essence of current education reform is the process of building a "world-class" school education system by identifying and adopting successful elements that excel in large-scale testing. In the process of learning from cross-border education policies, David Philips (2003) believes that cross-national attraction is a prerequisite and primary condition for policy learning. Only when a country has a cross-national attraction to another country will it initiate the latter to learn from educational policies. Thus, Cross-national attraction has become an important issue in the process of education quality comparison and education policy borrowing.
Compared with policy texts or academic papers, media texts are an indispensable, ubiquitous, and constructive force in the process of forming cross-national attraction, having a larger quantity, being more ubiquitous, and having a wider audience impact (Rawolle, 2010). To study the cross-national attraction of basic education, this study selected Finland, Singapore, and China, which have high rankings in PISA, as the sample countries. To see whether these “poster stars” in international large-scale assessments will become the “target countries”, which means will attract other countries’ interest in their educational policy, cross-national attraction about basic education of these three are compared, using media reports from 2018 to 2020 about PISA related these three countries in US, UK, Germany and India. By counting the reference and coding the attitude of these media texts, it is found that Finland, Singapore, and China have been paid attention widespread and reviewed differently in those four countries, which means that there is a difference in the cross-national attraction of those three countries even though all of them have performed well in international large-scale assessment programs. By text analysing of these media words, it is revealed further that economy, traditional culture, and geopolitics are important factors that affect the cross-national attraction of “target countries” to others. For those countries that try to borrow basic educational policy, the factors that determine the cross-national attraction of those three are different. In the context of global education governance, the processes of the continuous formation of the cross-national attraction of basic education of Finland, Singapore, and China are complex. The generation mechanism of cross-national attraction is not only influenced by the success of the “target country” in international large-scale tests but also affected by the degree of consistency between the reasons for their success valued by the media text in various countries and the demands for basic education reform of others. In conclusion, as the preliminary stage of policy borrowing, cross-national attraction will vary in the eye of different countries that might initiate basic educational reform. It is constructed by media texts based on the review and explanation of these target countries’ success, including positive and negative voices.

Author

• Shanyun He, Zhejiang Uinversity