Global Trends in Education Reform Amid Political Upheaval and Cultural Transformation

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

National governments have long embraced the act of education reforms as a central mechanism to reshape their school systems and address persistent challenges of access, quality, and equity. While some reforms address specific goals such as improving student outcomes, others aim to focus on reorganizing education systems, by either creating new organizational structures or implementing credentialing, assessment, and accountability systems. Although often taken for granted as a necessary mechanism for improvement, reform has long been criticized as cyclical and symbolic. Scholars highlight its tendency to repeat without producing lasting change (Cuban 1990; Debeauvais & Livesey 1986; Zaff 2011), or to serve as ritualized signaling rather than substantive transformation (Ball 1998). Yet countries persist in reforming “again and again” (Cuban 1990).
In many ways, reforms are like promises by the government, reflecting legitimated social issues to be addressed and solutions that should be taken (Bromley et al., 2024). In an era marked by political polarization, democratic backsliding, and increasing skepticism toward global institutions and cooperation, it is especially important to examine the discourse reforms seek to mobilize and the broader conditions under which they proliferate or decline. Our main goal is thus to better understand the global and national mechanisms that shape the decision to reform, the content of reforms, and how these mechanisms reflect cultural and political shifts. In this panel, we propose to present a set of four studies that uncover latent political trends of education reforms at the cross-national level.
Studies in our panel draw upon the World Education Reform Database (WERD), a cross-national and longitudinal dataset of more than 10,000 education reforms from over 215 countries and territories (Bromley et al., 2023). Reforms were collected from country reports including: World Data on Education, published by UNESCO; Project Appraisal Documents (PAD) and Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) published by the World Bank; Education Policy Outlook (EPO), Reviews of National Policies for Education (RNPE) and the Education Reform Finder, published by the OECD; Elsevier Science’s International Encyclopedia of Education; and the European Commission's SHARE database on educational reforms. A team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants identified education reforms from these reports, using a standardized definition and coding protocol. WERD’s definition of reform is any planned, systemic, and non-routine change to education systems. We consider reforms as ‘planned’ in that they occur intentionally, and they are ‘systemic’ changes at supra-school administrative levels (Brunsson, 2009; Cuban, 1990). Finally, reforms take on a ‘non-routine’ characteristic, intending to enact something new or different from the existing conditions (Labaree, 1997). Our inter-rater reliability checks yielded a result of 0.85, which is considered excellent by the extant literature (Cicchetti, 1994).
Our approach focuses on the rhetorical claims of reform rather than implementation outcomes. While this limits our ability to measure effectiveness, it allows us to treat reform as discourse—an act through which states articulate legitimacy, aspirations, and alignment with world-cultural models. This perspective situates education policy in relation to broader global dynamics, from the optimism of postwar expansion to the dominance of neoliberal governance, and today’s era of polarization and contested norms.
This year we are celebrating continued expansion of WERD with a new public version of the database (V4), reflecting a sustained, collaborative effort over many years. At CIES 2019, our pilot analysis revealed that reform activity increased sharply in the 1990s but declined after 2008, coinciding with the financial crisis and pushback against globalization. Since then, our panels have examined education reforms from multiple vantage points: their cultural conditions, shifting policy content, and rhetorical framings in terms of human rights, human capital, and inclusion of marginalized groups. We have also investigated reforms’ diffusion across levels of education, the organizational models they reflect, and their relationship to learning outcomes, particularly in areas such as STEM. Together, these findings demonstrate that reform is deeply cultural as well as consequential, shaping the lives of students, families, and educators on a massive scale.
At this year’s CIES conference, we build on this program of research with a new set of studies based on the updated WERD dataset. These studies consider the changing role of education systems from a global perspective, blurring the lines between the public and the private through expanding discourse on early childhood education, higher education, and social-emotional learning, while examining how such changes vary along the contours of cross-national variation, or in contexts of profound political transition. We also explore new methods to analyze the data, such as Word Embedding Models. Proposed papers consider the normative changes in education reforms to contextualize our understanding of dramatic global transitions through the national governance of education.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Tom Nachtigal, Stanford Graduate School of Education

Chair

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Tracing Reform Patterns and Change in Higher Education - Rie Kijima, University of Toronto; Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto OISE

• Governing Education Across the Life Course: Examining the Global Construction of Early Childhood in Education Reforms, 1960-2020 - Minju Choi, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

• Transposed Yet Intact: The Global Diffusion and National Reframings of Social-Emotional Learning in National Education Reforms - Tom Nachtigal, Stanford Graduate School of Education