The Weakening of Neoliberal World Society: Global Determinants of Education Reform, 1960-2017

• In Event: The Changing Dynamics of Global Education Reform: Globalization and Variation Mechanisms in a (Post-)Neoliberal Era

Proposal

As ongoing challenges to neoliberal world society continue to develop, the role of education as a central vehicle for individual and national development may weaken. To shed light on how world changes are influencing education, we consider changes in the levels of education reform in 147 countries over the period 1960 to 2017. To test our argument, we created a database of education reforms in countries around the world over time; the final analyses include 6,696 reforms. We created the database by extracting reforms listed in hundreds of reports submitted to major international organizations involved in education; including, the OECD’s Education Policy Outlook, the OECD’s Review of National Policies in Education (RNPE), the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER), World Data on Education (WDE) reports produced by UNESCO and the International Bureau of Education (IBE), and the International Encyclopedia of Education (IEE) compiled by country experts. The intra-class correlation for coding reforms from the aforementioned list of documents is 0.85 (which is considered “excellent” by common standards of inter-rater reliability. We then use dynamic negative binomial panel regression models to examine the determinants of national education reform, focusing particularly on historical trends and the changing role of the World Bank and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs).
We find a sharp drop in levels of national reform over time, in line with arguments that education is losing its place as a globalized and institutionalized theory of progress. We also find evidence of changing power dynamics among prominent organizational actors in the global system. The influence of World Bank loans in promoting education reform declines over time, while the influence of INGOs grows. This suggests a changing system of governance, where formal coercive pressures, such as the loan conditionalities used by the World Bank, become less palatable, while the normative influences of civil society grow stronger. Overall, our findings show that education reform arises as a macro – global – process as much as a response to local needs and conditions.

Authors

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University

• Rie Kijima, University of Toronto

• Lisa Overbey, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Minju Choi, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Heitor Santos, Stanford University