The politics of differentiation reforms in secondary education

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

Proposal

The massification of secondary education constitutes one of the key post-war educational projects (Benavot 1983; Wiborg 2009). The structures implemented to meet the increasing demand for post-primary education, however, have differed widely in terms of the extent to which they offer student cohorts comprehensive (stratification) and equal (standardisation) experiences, with important consequences on the social and economic configuration of advanced economies (Allmendinger 1989). Combining insights from partisan politics (e.g., Ansell 2010; Gingrich 2011) and vested interests (Moe 2011), this paper theoretically argues that this variation is shaped by the interaction of electoral logics and specific producer groups, namely teachers’ unions and churches as school providers. We show that the position of parties and governments towards tracking and standardised provision is shaped by both the effort to extend their traditional electorates and appeal to increasingly education-friendly middle-class voters as well as by their relationship with producer groups. Right-wing governments do show a preference for targeted educational benefits while the left tries to equalise educational provision. However, whether governments pursued these preferences within tracked or comprehensive structures depends on their varying links to groups who were to lose status and revenue from comprehensive reforms.
The argument is tested on two novel datasets coding post-war change in stratification and standardisation in 20 countries as well as the structure and alignment of organised interests in education. We analyse this data in two ways. First, we use a focused medium-N comparison to show that partisan and interest configurations are associated with specific reform patterns. Second, we rely on inductive process-tracing (Bennett & Checkel 2015) to reconstruct the positions and coalitions adopted by relevant actors in selected cases, and how they developed in time to shape reform dynamics.
The analysis suggests that the influence of interest groups intersects with parties’ distributive aim in shaping reforms and takes a step towards theorising this intersection.
This paper then, suggests that IO influence enters into different domestic environments, shaping the ways in which influence plays out. While generic moves towards de-stratifying reforms often were promoted by global actors, the partisan and interest group space around them shaped their structure.

Authors

• Jane Gingrich, University Of Oxford

• Anja Giudici, University of Oxford