Studying the Global Education Reform Movement through the lenses of a Policy Instruments Approach

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In the last decades, most countries in the world have faced major pressures to reform their educational systems. The emerging demand for global skills in increasingly inter-dependent economies, the challenges generated by technological innovation, and the comparisons of educational systems promoted by international large-scale assessments have contributed to the expansion of the so-called Global Education Reform movement (GERM). The GERM is an education reform approach that broadly follows the tenets of New Public Management and, accordingly, is structured around a common set of policy ideas including standards-based management, performance evaluation, and accountability. The GERM has disseminated widely due to its promise to modernize education systems and strengthen their performance. However, the GERM phenomenon has been more profoundly studied in Anglo-Saxon countries, where it did emerge, and it is not clear to what extent this reform movement has contributed to alter the governance of educational systems globally.
The two most emblematic policy instruments through which the GERM disseminates globally are national large-scale assessments and test-based accountability. The presentations in this panel analyze the complex, path-dependent and contingent processes of policy change through which the GERM goes in different contexts (Northern Europe, South America and Mediterranean countries). The panel shows that the GERM follows variegated policy trajectories that are markedly conditioned by the politico-administrative regimes that prevail in these different regions. The paper also shows that the education policy change that the policy instruments of the GERM involve has an additive nature, and goes through recurrent back-and-forth dynamics and lock-in effects, often triggered by the new economic and political subjectivities that the GERM itself generates. All the papers have in common that have analysed the GERM phenomenon through the lenses a political sociology approach to policy of instruments, which in many occasions has been combined with elements of historical institutionalism.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Globalization and Education

Chair

• Jessica Holloway, Deakin University

Individual Presentations

• The political sociology of policy instruments and education policy change: Toward a research agenda - Andreu Termes, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• The Eclectic Production of Standardized School Assessments: Assemblage of Techniques, Rationales and Actors in the Case of Chile - Alejandra Falabella, University Alberto Hurtado; Claudio Ramos Zincke, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

• Test-Based Accountability and School Choice in Spain: Reforming education Through Policy Instruments. - Marcel Pagès Martín, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Miriam Prieto, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

• Test-based accountability as an ‘empty vessel’: the adoption, re-contextualization and retention of a contested policy instrument in the Norwegian school system - Marjolein Camphuijsen, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Jorunn Møller, University of Oslo; Guri Skedsmo, University of Oslo

• The Evolution of Test-based Accountability in Dutch Schools: What We Can Learn Comparing the Experiences of Primary and Secondary Schools - Natalie Browes, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Discussants

• Christian Ydesen, Aalborg University

• Jaakko Kauko, University of Tampere, Finland