Public Schools and the Global Turn: Policy Tensions and Negotiations in the Pursuit of Internationalization

• In Event: School choice and the global world order

Proposal

Background and Context
Education research has recently been shaped by what some call a “global turn,” marked by efforts to move beyond methodological nationalism and engage with transnational influences on education systems (Beck, 2007). Global processes now permeate nearly every sphere of education, requiring a sociology that attends to the interplay between global and local forces (Maxwell et al., 2020). In Kazakhstan, the embrace of international education models has been tied to broader goals of modernization, competitiveness, and excellence. While internationalization was initially confined to elite private schools and specialized public schools such as the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS), private institutions like Miras International Schools introduced the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme as early as the 2000s.
The enactment of IB in state-funded mainstream schools, however, is recent, unfolding over the past four years alongside the adaptation of other globally referenced frameworks such as the Cambridge curriculum (Engel et al., 2019). While signaling alignment with international standards, this shift has generated tensions around governance, equity of access for “non-elite” students, teacher preparedness, and the scope of local agency in adapting reforms (Beech et al., 2022). These tensions reveal that internationalization is not a neutral process but a contested terrain.

Problem Statement
Internationalization of curriculum is not only about adopting foreign frameworks but also about political and cultural negotiations (Yemini, 2014). As Priestley (2002) argues, curriculum policy can act both as “a reaction against and a response to globalization” (p. 123). This is evident in Kazakhstan, where policy actors seek to globalize schooling while preserving national values. Yet despite the prominence of internationalization in policy discourse, little is known about how reforms are interpreted and enacted at both national and school levels. A closer understanding is needed of how policymakers, curriculum developers, and educators negotiate global models, how reforms play out in practice, and what tensions arise between global ambitions and local realities.

Purpose and Research Questions
This study, drawing on policy borrowing research (Steiner-Khamsi, 2021) and the concept of cosmopolitan nationalism (Maxwell et al., 2020), focuses on the internationalization of curriculum in Kazakhstan’s public schools. The study addresses the following two research questions: (1) How does the IB, as a global model of pedagogic governance, interact with local socioeconomic structures in Kazakhstan’s public schools? And (2) How does the internationalization of curriculum in Kazakhstan’s public education express tensions between aspirations for global competitiveness and the preservation of national identity?

Research Design and Methodology
The study employed a qualitative multiple case study design (Yin, 2018). Three public schools were selected as cases: (1) a public international school within the NIS network implementing the IB Middle Years and Diploma Programmes; (2) a public lyceum school offering the IB Primary Years Programme; and (3) a public international school implementing all three IB programmes.

The study draws on two interview data sets. The first data set, approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Teachers College, Columbia University (Protocol #21-295), draws on ten interviews with the administration of the NIS school system conducted between June 2021 and March 2023. The second interview data set, collected in August 2025 and approved by the IRB of Nazarbayev University (Protocol #1104/01072025), comprises semi-structured interviews with five key national-level policymakers involved in curriculum development and reform based at the Ministry of Education and National Academy of Education, as well as ten school-level practitioners, including principals, IB coordinators, and teachers, who were directly engaged in implementing international curriculum models in regular public schools. These interviews aimed to capture both the top-down policy intentions and the bottom-up experiences of policy enactment, allowing for a nuanced understanding of how internationalization is interpreted, negotiated, and practiced across different levels of the education system.

Findings
Two key findings emerge from this study. First, the enactment of the IB within Kazakhstan’s mainstream public education system reflects the government’s strategy to align national schooling with global educational discourses. By embedding IB’s emphasis on ‘learning to learn’, critical thinking, and international mindedness, policymakers sought to position Kazakhstan’s students as competitive global citizens, capable of engaging with transnational knowledge economies and contributing to the nation’s modernization agenda. This move signaled a deliberate effort to transcend traditional models and adopt a curriculum recognized worldwide for its academic rigor and global orientation.
Second, this embrace of IB was not without tension. National policy elites voiced concerns that the dominance of Western-centric values embedded in IB curricula, long established in international private schools, risked overshadowing the traditional cultural and moral values of the Kazakh people. For some, the expansion of IB raised fears of cultural dilution, generating debates about the balance between cultivating globally minded learners and preserving a sense of national identity. These concerns illustrate the contested terrain of curriculum reform, where the imperatives of globalization intersect with the politics of cultural continuity and national heritage.

Contribution
This study contributes to the growing body of research on cosmopolitan nationalism in education policy by examining how these dynamics unfold in a post-socialist system. The present study resonates strongly with the four dimensions identified by Yemini et al. (2023): the integration of IB into the public school sector, the adaptation of curricula to align with global standards such as those promoted by the OECD, the positioning of Kazakhstan’s education system as innovative through external policy referencing, and the parallel insistence on preserving national cultural values as a counterbalance to perceived Western dominance. At the same time, the analysis shows how these dimensions are configured in the post-socialist context of Kazakhstan, where state-led reforms rather than bottom-up initiatives drive the negotiation between global and national imperatives. In this way, the study extends the cosmopolitan nationalism framework by demonstrating how post-socialist states employ policy borrowing both as a tool for global positioning and as a means of reinforcing national identity.

Author

• Kairat Kurakbayev, Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education