Global Trends in Education Reforms: Discursive Changes between 1960-2019

• In Event: Global Education Reforms: Discursive Trends and Policy Impact, 1960-2020

Proposal

The recent rise of nationalism and erosion of democracy have been associated with disillusionment with neoliberalism, indicating a weakening of this world order and its institutions of human rights (Bromley et al., 2023; Becker, 2020). Research has documented neoliberal institutional pressures on education, including how increasing global economic competition have redefined the purposes of education (Sahlberg, 2016; Klees, 2008; Adley et al., 2021), but the questions whether and to what extent trends of illiberalism have permeated education policy cross-nationally are still underexplored. While neoliberalism is often thought of in economic terms, scholars have theorized that the open market logic is rooted in broader cultural models emphasizing individualism - i.e., empowerment of individuals as key social actors entitled to human rights (Lerch et al., 2022). Such cultural influence on education has also been documented as well, e.g., the growing emphasis on individualized actorhood (Bromley et al., 2011; Lerch et al., 2017), and is considered in this study of the changes in neoliberal influence on national education reforms.
Drawing on WERD, with more than 10,000 education reforms from more than 180 countries between 1946-2021, provides a unique opportunity to examine prevalent trends from a birds-eye view. I leverage the discursive act of education reforms (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Bromley et al., 2023) and use topic modeling, a Natural Language Processing method, to answer how has the global discourse in education changed across three eras - before the rise of neoliberalism (1946-1990), during the neoliberal era (1990-2008), and after 2008, allegedly reflecting a turning point in neoliberal global dominance (Beckert, 2020).
This inductive approach offers an opportunity to ground systematic insights in language directly used in primary resources across all reforms in our database. Preliminary findings suggest a nuanced picture of both changing and consistent neoliberal institutional influences. First, initial findings reveal changes in power structures of educational institutions; where decentralization and privatization of education were gradually introduced during the 1980s, this trend has solidified and exploded during the 1990s, while contrasting with increased trends of regulation and central data-driven supervision after 2008. Second, education continues to expand beyond K-12, alongside embedded commitment to inclusion of marginalized communities, indicating persistence of neoliberal cultural institutions (Lerch et al., 2022). I also analyze how these trends are associated with country levels of democracy, to examine permeation of illiberalism to education reform discourse.

Authors

• Tom Nachtigal, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University