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Recontextualizing post-bureaucratic reforms in different educational systems: private actors, public administration, and schools

Wed, March 13, 6:30 to 8:00pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Third Level, Foster 1

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The governance of education, its institutions, and its agents has been a key area of public policy reforms in the last decades, where global discourses, models, and reform packages have traveled from one country to another. Dozens of countries have embraced a public administration reform, aiming at changing and modernizing the role of the state in the provision and coordination of public services (Pollit et al., 2007). In education, this trend has involved a global reform agenda based on school autonomy with accountability (SAWA), conceding larger decision-making powers to school-level agents while steering them at a distance through standardized evaluation instruments (Verger et al., 2019). More so, non-state actors such as edu businesses, philanthropists, or NGOs have gained a larger role in education governance thanks to pro-market proposals advocating for a minimal state (Srivastava, 2020). These changes entail new ways of governing education and regulating the power relations between the multiple actors involved, captured by the notion of post-bureaucratic reforms to the state (Johnson et al., 2009). However, the shifts in power relations and the adoption of the instruments that operationalize post-bureaucratic reforms are path-dependent to the institutional, political, and economic conditions of the different national and subnational contexts (Pierson & Skocpol, 2002). Hence, in the midst of these ongoing governance transformations, we seek to address how global reforms like SAWA are recontextualized among different countries, together with the role of non-state actors in doing so.
Post-bureaucratic governance portrays the shift from traditional bureaucratic modes of regulating education towards newer approaches such as the evaluative state and the quasi-market models (Maroy, 2009). The ‘governance turn’ unpacked the shift from state-centered and hierarchical governments towards the establishment of networks of heterogeneous actors inextricably linked among each other within the state (Jessop, 2010). Furthermore, the New Public Management agenda in education became the paradigm to regulate the growing networked governance, fostering agents’ autonomy combined with strict monitoring of pre-establish targets (Rhodes, 2007). Bureaucratic governance lies on legislation, hierarchy, and state monopoly as the source of authority combined with professional regulatory models given the uncertain nature of the educational praxis (Maroy, 2009). Thus, the bureaucratic model merged high degrees of professional autonomy for teachers, ranging from pedagogical autonomy to the regulation of their professional careers through associations and unions (Fallabela, 2014). In contrast, the SAWA agenda in education -as a paradigmatic example of post-bureaucratic governance- advances different regulatory instruments to deconcentrate decision-making to lower tiers of government while exercising control by means of large-scale assessments, performance indicators, and other outcomes targets. Remarkably, post-bureaucratic governance logic has penetrated the different realms of education systems, revamping power hierarchies, state boundaries, and actors’ agency.
Globally, post-bureaucratic reforms are expressed through multiple reform agendas, discourses, and policy networks that advance the standardization of education, newer control mechanisms, and the involvement of private actors in public education. However, their manifestations are contingent on the specificities of the context in which are deployed. Most research on these transformations and particularly on SAWA has focused on the Global North, Anglo-Saxon countries, and Chile (Greany & Higham, 2019; Parcerisa et al., 2022; Wallner et al., 2020). However, little is known about the trajectory, impacts, and enactments of SAWA reforms in other settings, especially in Latin America and South European countries. This panel aims to fill this gap by providing evidence from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Spain, analyzing the multiphasic nature of post-bureaucratic reforms. More specifically, we address the process of recontextualization of SAWA reforms in understudied settings, focusing on the different iterations from a national and multi-scalar perspective, by answering the following questions:

1.How do philanthropic actors engage in policymaking to advance education reform across different contexts? Which are the rationales, discourses, and imaginaries articulated behind them? Which topics and problems are being devised and which are being side-lined?

2.Why did different countries adopt the reform agenda of school autonomy and accountability? How did the institutional, economic, and political legacies shape the adoption and translation of autonomy and accountability policies?

3.What policy instruments have been adopted and implemented across different countries and why? Under what conditions were the policy instruments adopted and what adoptions were needed to fit into the different contexts? What governance shifts have these policy instruments introduced in the different countries?

4.What role have instrument constituencies played in the calibration or fluctuation of such policy instruments? To what extent and how have they shaped policy trajectories?

5.How do schools interpret, make sense of, and enact the different goals of school autonomy and accountability? In what ways do schools respond to the demands of improvement and innovation and which logic they act out? What are the mechanisms that explain different school responses?

The five papers in this panel engage with the particularities of current post-bureaucratic reforms in education across different countries and scales. The first explores the growing role of new philanthropy and its efficacy in advancing nationwide education reforms in Argentina and Brazil. Through heterogeneous policy networks, philanthropic foundations are erasing the boundaries between the private and public sectors while advancing an educational agenda that foster privatization and performance management in education. The second presentation focuses on Colombia, an understudied case of high levels of autonomy with low and high-stakes accountability instruments, the paper explores the rationale, global influence, and domestic conditions behind the adoption and evolution of SAWA between 2002-2022. The third paper discusses the role that policy constituencies -actors and practices- play in the retention and reconfiguration of large-scale learning assessment policies in Argentina. The last two papers are dedicated to the study of the case of Catalonia (Spain). The fourth paper analyzes how disadvantaged schools respond to the improvement mandate using organizational alignment and decoupling mechanisms as responses to diverse policy interpretations. The fifth paper explores how principals and teachers comprehend and implement fundamental aspects of instructional reform, such as innovation, competence-based approaches, and project-based methods. The study takes into account specific school features, including reputation and demand in local education markets, as influential factors mediating the diverse outcomes of innovation implementation.

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