World Education Reforms to Improve Learning and Teaching, 1970-2018

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Education reforms at the national and global levels aim to change and improve current education systems so that they provide more equitable opportunities for learners. With persistent challenges of exclusion, power imbalances, conflict and violence, climate change, and new emergencies arising like the global pandemic, countries engage in reforms “again and again” (Cuban 1990). Educators and scholars have criticized such cyclical and window dressing-like patterns of reforms, questioning the efficacy of reforms and pointing to their failure to achieve real improvements (Debeauvais & Livesey 1986; Psacharopoulos 1989; Zaff 2011). In fact, main lines of scholarship in education policy seek to evaluate the effectiveness of policies and programs through empirical analyses (e.g. randomized controlled trials in development economics, see Duflo, Banerjee, and Kremer’s work). Instead of assessing individual programs or policies, our research team seeks to assess the trends, patterns, and effects of education reforms at a global scale, comparing across countries and regions. Our main goal is thus to better understand the global and national mechanisms that drive the decision to reform and their longer term effects on educational outcomes.

To answer these research questions, we have gathered more than 9,000 reforms from more than 600 education country reports published between 1994 and 2018. Our data sources include: (1) UNESCO International Bureau of Education World Data on Education (2006 and 2010) country reports; (2) OECD Education Policy Outlook country reports; (3) OECD Reports of National Policies in Education; (4) World Bank Systems Approach for Better Education Results country reports; (5) country entries in the 1994 edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education; and (6) World Bank Project Appraisal Documents. Following a standardized definition, research assistants recorded any laws, acts or self-described “education reforms” in these reports. After the first phase of collecting reforms mentioned in the country reports, the content of these education reforms were coded using the exact description of the reform discussed in these reports. Research assistants were asked to code each reform description according to various categories of policy areas, education levels, and thematic questions. Individual papers in our panel explore several of these dimensions captured in our dataset.

After several rounds of testing for inter-coder reliability and discussions, the research team settled on a relatively narrow definition of reform to maintain comparability. Reforms are ‘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 something new or different from existing conditions that are not fad-like programs or initiatives (Labaree 1997). One limitation of capturing reforms in this way is that we are only able to observe rhetorical claims to reform rather than other important dimensions such as implementation of reform. We hope to develop approaches to measure other dimensions and meanings in future work. Despite these drawbacks, our data provide the most comprehensive and systematic dataset of cross-national education reforms to date, containing reforms from countries in all regions of the world over more than fifty years.

At the CIES conference this year in 2023, our research team is excited to present the public version of the World Education Reform Database (WERD) and highlight several new projects that look at reforms aiming to achieve dimensions of quality and achievement at various education levels. Some of the characteristics captured in the WERD include: reform title, year, country, and report source. This public release of the data will be useful for any researchers interested in studying reforms across countries around the world, as well as reform discourse captured by different organizational and report types. In many ways we have benefitted from the discussion that occurred at CIES 2022, where we presented several of our papers with other colleagues around the world that study education reforms and their discourse. We hope to continue this conversation in 2023, discussing the role of reforms in this era of uncertainty and political polarization in many societies. Our panel at the CIES conference this year hopes to draw on this unique cross-national and historical dataset to examine the following topics: (1) reforms and their impact on learning outcomes, (2) the expansionary trends in reforms at different levels of education, and (3) global diffusion of early childhood education reforms. These papers critically examine the effect of reforms in education and hope to offer a global and macro-level perspective that contextualizes existing studies of education reform.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• National Education Reforms and Learning Outcomes - Rie Kijima, University of Toronto

• The Expansion of Education: Examining Changes and Trends of Reforms at Different Education Levels - Jieun Song, Stanford University

• The Global Adoption of Early Childhood Education Reforms, 1970-2018 - Minju Choi, Stanford Graduate School of Education

Discussant

• Patricia Bromley, Stanford University