Reforming Education in Developing Countries

From Neoliberalism to Communitarianism

Izhar Oplatka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351234320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Underpinned in the stream of thought named 'communitarianism', Reforming Education in Developing Countries argues that developing countries need educational reforms that are tightly entwined into their cultural, social, and organizational contexts. It questions the applicability of neoliberal reforms in developing societies, through an analysis of the main elements of neoliberalism in education. It highlights the critical role of the community and suggests new and alternative lines of thought for the practice of reform initiation and implementation in developing countries.

The book criticizes major neoliberal ideas in education, illuminates the distinctions between current neoliberal reforms and the characteristics of traditional societies, analyzes major educational ideologies in the developed world, and emphasizes the key role of local communities in this world. It proposes a dynamic model of reforming education in these countries that includes three major phases and integrates both modern and traditional (indigenous) educational purposes and values. Evocative ponderings are outlined throughout the book to promote critical thinking and reframing of educators' views towards educational reform and change.

This book will be of great interest to researchers and students in the fields of educational leadership, educational policy, educational change, comparative education, political science, and sociology. It will also appeal to educators, supervisors, and policymakers.

1
Why we need an alternative view of reform in developing countries

Our planet is colorful and manifold not only because it encompasses the land, the sea, and the sky, not only because it is embedded with a wide variety of animals and plants but mainly because of the diverse cultural and social mosaic that together creates the human species and paints the political map in many colors as well. Each color signals a distinctive human entity, a unique cultural and social life, a place whose people adhere to entrenched values and norms that distinctively mold their viewpoints and guide their behaviors.

The similarities and distinctions among cultures, societies, and countries in the world have been targeted by many researchers from comparative political science (e.g., Green & Luehrmann, 2007), international management (e.g., Steers, Sanchez-Runde, & Nardon, 2010), public administration (e.g., Riggs, 2006), and comparative education (e.g., Magno, 2013; Philips & Schweisfurth, 2014). Comparative analyses conducted by researchers in these and related disciplines aim, by and large, at illuminating the particular characteristics of each culture and society and, in turn, promote intercultural fertilization of knowledge and practice.

When educational systems worldwide are the target of research, the field of comparative education is intended, according to Philips and Schweisfurth (2014), to promote the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated conceptual framework aimed at describing and analyzing educational phenomena. But, related to the purpose of this book, the scholars further emphasize the salient role of comparative education in devising and developing plans for educational reforms everywhere, although, as Lauwery (1969) indicated, this role is not to “prescribe rules for the good conduct of schools and teaching” (p. 153) but, rather, to explore what is done and why in each culture.

Educational reform is a complex phenomenon that combines ideologies, politics, organizational structures, human histories, and culture. It is intended to transform current instructional and organizational structures and procedures in an educational system, as the following definitions indicate:

Education reform is programs of educational change that are government-directed and initiated based on overtly political analysis.

(Levin, 2001, p. 19)

Reform is the goal of policies aimed at improving a system of education. Reform suggests a change not only in what is done but in the ways things are done. Reform, we would argue, is better understood as what is implemented and sustained on the ground and the effects, intended and unintended, on intended beneficiaries and on the system, rather than only what is intended.

(Williams & Cummings, 2005, p. XXXI)

Reform is an important change desired by the responsible authorities … [But] a reform is not necessarily an improvement.

(Prost, 2013, p. 302)

Schools and classrooms have been the recipients of a host of educational reforms aimed at modifying what and how teachers teach, what and how students learn, and what and how schools perform since the establishment of public education (Cuban, 2013). As a result, the implementation of educational reforms involves changing the status quo in schools and classrooms in many forms, such as changing the status of school principals in the reform of school-based management, introducing new forms of accountability in teaching, accepting and utilizing a new curriculum and putting it into practice, or improving teaching and learning incrementally. The implementation of the reform includes, for example, integrating new curricula into existing instructional practice, assuming that any educational change must serve pedagogical ends (Wrigley, Thomson, & Lingard, 2012).

In order for educational systems to change, school leaders and teachers must change. Their attitudes towards the initiated change and the type of daily interconnections among school members determine, to a large extent, whether any change will be adopted or stymied (Metzger, 2015). But good intentions and positive interactions in schools are insufficient for implementing successful reforms; factors such as leadership, trust, resources, school culture, supportive atmosphere, and persistence facilitate the process of change implementation in our educational systems (Fullan, 2011; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Williams & Cummings, 2005). Wrigley et al. (2012) explained the complex nature of educational change:

Educational change involves negotiating a tangle of taken-for-granted ideas, practice, identities, histories, and deeply held ‘truths.’ Bringing about change in systems that have evolved over long periods of time, and in which there are powerful vested interests committed to the status quo, is not an easy matter but requires hard intellectual and emotional work against the odds and, often, prevailing policy trends.

(p. 4)

Due to the complexity and difficulty of change, reforms are rarely implemented as planned, to say the least. In fact, reform implementation is hindered by a host of barriers, many of them unpredictable and hard to identify in advance, that we, as Levin (2001) maintained, should be surprised when our reforms succeed rather than when they fail. Educational change is more complex than usually perceived by policymakers and practitioners, let alone when the reform is intended to reshape instructional practices in the classroom. Therefore, as Cuban (2013) noted, in spite of many structural changes in schools and classrooms over the past two centuries in the US, most teaching practices in the classroom (e.g., textbook-driven lessons, teacher-centered lessons, periodic tests) remain familiar to generation after generation of parents and observers.

Briefly, as others have elaborated on it in the past (see, e.g., the works of Fullan, 2011, and Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009), change is difficult because of multiple obstructive factors such as the type of change itself (e.g., complexity, uncertainty), teacher resistance, conservative school cultures, organizational routines and procedures, and ineffective leadership. Metzger (2015), for instance, claimed that instructional change requires teachers to reexamine their pedagogical beliefs and attitudes they have held for a long time until they became an indispensable part of their professional identity. Levin (2001) added the voluntary dimension of changes, that is, that many teachers may have little or no interest in the reform and that, consequently, they are unlikely to alter their work habits.

Finally, Cuban (2013) offers a unique explanation that moves us from teachers and school leaders and their working conditions and habits to the level of policymakers and their false ideas and beliefs concerning education reforms. Accordingly, policymakers mistakenly assume that initiating or reconstructing school structure, governance, or curriculum will be enough to bring about change in instruction and learning within classrooms. They simply do not evaluate how complicated and complex classrooms are, and they err in thinking that their worldview is the same as that of teachers while, in reality, teachers and policymakers share different professional experiences, values, and beliefs. He further noted,

Assuming that structural changes will directly lead to changing traditional teaching practices in complex organizations like districts and schools without making distinctions between quality in teaching and quality of teachers have left a trail of broken dreams, wrecked careers, and ‘oops!’ from policy-makers who have departed for different jobs.

(Cuban, 2013, p. 119)

Policymakers err in another aspect of reform initiation and implementation that is of great significance to developing countries – the transfer of policies from one country to another blindly and uncritically. Policy transfer is characterized by many forms, ranging from imposition of ideas (e.g., neoliberal ideologies) through policies negotiated under constraint support (e.g., educational projects in Africa sponsored by the World Bank) to borrowing ideas and governmental procedures voluntarily (e.g., when local policymakers seek to import a certain educational reform deliberately from elsewhere). For instance, Schweisfurth (2008) showed that the most heavily indebted countries, such as The Gambia, depend heavily on financial aid and therefore are more likely to be susceptible to pressures of adopting policies that meet the goals of the aiding agency (e.g., a quest for higher enrollment, particularly among girls).

In this sense, globalization has much influence on the dissemination of educational ideas and teaching methods (Philips & Schweisfurth, 2014) and of managerial ideologies from the developed world to developing countries. For example, the literature about public administration is replete with debates about the suitability of the New Public Management model in developing countries (e.g., Minogue, 2001; Riggs, 2006). On one side of the spectrum are international aid donors that believe in the great benefits of market-oriented solutions (e.g., privatization, efficiency reforms, decentralization) for public administration in developing countries. On the second side of the spectrum, given the political cultures in developing countries, it is unlikely that these concepts and their related practices will transfer between Western and non-Western systems smoothly and effectively.

Let’s elaborate on the second side and further highlight the dangers of blindly adopting reforms that have been devised in different cultural and organizational contexts. One of the putative scholars in comparative education, Noah (1983), warned against the dangers of ethnocentricity, of exploring social phenomena through the (Anglo-American) observer’s own perspective, and of a belief in the generalizability to other contexts from the experiences of Western industrialized nations. Similarly, Philips and Schweisfurth (2014) remarked that the seemingly simple process of borrowing a successful practice from one country to another is, in fact, extraordinarily complex. Wrigley et al. (2012) further clarify this complexity:

It seems to us that, with some notable exceptions, much international reform policy, as it floats between nation states in deeply de-contextualized ways, misrecognizes specificity and professional expertise and therefore fails to deliver what it promises.

(p. 3)

Their view is supported by past research and public reports that emphasize the need to acknowledge local needs and contexts before borrowing a reform originated elsewhere on the globe. For instance, an attempt to borrow the Finnish structure that leads to its educational system successful will face many cultural and social barriers because, as Sahlberg (2011) found, there are distinctive factors in this country that together create the conditions leading to its educational success. It is unsurprising, then, that the World Bank review of 10 years of experience of educational reform in Eastern Europe warns against the blind transfer of policies from one context to another because there are no blueprints for reform (Fiszbein, 2001).

Moreover, any organization that attempts to impose its behavioral norms upon unwilling employees from another culture faces an uphill battle (Mead & Andrews, 2009). Many developing countries simply lack capacity and resources to implement foreign-designed reforms, such as in the case of educational standards and national testing because of cultural, social, and cultural circumstances that usually differ from those in the developed world (Earnest, 2006; Hanushek, 2016; Magno, 2013; Polidano, 2001; Wilson, Zhang, Tu, & Liu, 2016).

Congruent with opponents of ‘blind’ policy transfer between nations, particularly between developed and developing countries, the basic argument I put forward in this book is that developing countries need educational reforms that are tightly interconnected into their cultural, social, and organizational contexts. In this sense, the purposes of the reforms and the modes of their implementation should be compatible with the particular cultural and social structures and procedures in each country.

To further clarify my argument, I pose three purposes in this book. First, as a prelude to my analysis of policy initiation and implementation in the developing world, I revisit fundamental conjectures in neoliberal thought in education. Inconsistent with the neoliberal assumptions that schools can be managed like any other work organizations regardless of culture, society, and organizational structures; that is, management is a universal human practice (Gibton, 2013), my intention is to question the applicability of neoliberal thoughts in developing countries. To this end, I juxtapose the essentials of neoliberalism in education with models of national cultures that illuminate distinctions among cultures (e.g., Hofstede, 2001; Trompenaars, 1993) and clarify contradictions and inconsistencies.

Second, I draw on the stream of thought called ‘communitarianism’ that in spite of its extremely heterogeneity was developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century from a critique of liberal individualism (Arthur, 2010) and ‘glorified’ collectivism. Congruent with the priority given by many communitarian scholars to the particular over the universal (Avineri & de-Shalit, 1992; Studdert, 2005), I emphasize the critical role of the community, “a place where solidarity, participation and coherence are found” (Taylor, 2011, p. 45), in any reform initiation and implementation in developing countries. Accordingly, the local community in these countries is constructed as a mechanism to improve the quality of classroom teaching and learning because of the collective nature of many national cultures in the developing world. Following Wrigley et al. (2012), who pondered about who is driving change, I analyze the significance of the local community in driving the reform, articulating aims, and sharpening the interests of its local members.

My third purpose is to discuss new and alternative lines of thought for the practice of reform initiation and implementation in developing countries. To this end, the book debates the meanings and purposes of education in non-Western countries, ponders particular contexts and circumstances affecting educational change, and reexamines the role of curriculum, teachers, and educational leaders in developing countries during times of education reforms.Special attention is given to the kind of attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge we may expect educators and community members to hold.

I have acquired support for my arguments and purposes from several scholars and researchers who emphasize the impact of culture on knowledge production, question the transfer of ideas from one culture to another, sharpen the devastating consequences of blind transfer of reforms, or make a connection between culture and management.

To begin with knowledge production, it is widely held that knowledge is “a social construction, which is built collectively in often unpredictable interactions among teachers, children and young people, texts, family members, media and objects, and through events and experience” (Wrigley et al., 2012, p. 4). Thus, it is hardly surprising that there are fundamental cultural differences in the ways people come to understand themselves, and our self-concept is influenced by our culture (Heine, 2008). The self-concept molds the ways people think about the world (e.g., What is the ‘proper’ schooling? What is the ‘ideal’ role of teachers?).

Notably, knowledge produced in one part of the world is not superior or preferable over knowledge produced in other parts of it. Feyerabend (1975) noted that exporting Western science and technology has not brought only well-being to indigenous people, and Raine (2001) asserted that the modern myth of rationalism and objective thinking is becoming increasingly destructive for the majority of the world’s people. No one, then, can claim that one way of reforming education is superior just because it is suitable to the rich and developed world or because global aid agencies have the funding and the power to force their ‘superior’ solution for ‘all’ the difficulties and ‘ineffectiveness’ found in the educational systems in developing countries.

Furthermore, as mentioned before, scholars from comparative fields of study reject one best blueprint approach, according to which it is possible to simply borrow or transfer what apparently ‘works’ in specific and ‘successful’ educational system across countries (Wrigley et al., 2012). Instead, they call for testing carefully the feasibility of the transfer of policies and reforms despite the apparent willingness to modernize administrative and organizational procedures in developing countries (Philips & Schweisfurth, 2014; Riggs, 2006). But ‘external’ reformers are expected to analyze what happens all along the different phases of change implementation and to find out what kind of educational practices actually prevail. In this sense, Polidano (2001) asks whether the New Public Management reforms that become a common response to public hostility to government and shrinking public budgets actually are being implemented in developing countries, or are we being misled by the rhetoric of political leaders. His deliberation is very similar to mine.

Needless to say, the result of blind transfer of reforms across countries is not epitomized only in a misleading rhetoric. According to Sahlberg (2016) externally borrowed reforms undermine two important elements of successful educational change – they constrain the role of national policy development and local schools’ capability to improve themselves continuously from within, and they paralyze teachers’ and schools’ attempts to learn from local histories and to learn from one another how to improve their administrative and instructional functions. Riggs (2006) further clarifies the particular difficulties of reforms in ‘alien’ educational arenas:

The problem which can perplex an administrative reformer in a transitional society is not only his inability to see the facts of a situation and to understand what ought, technically, to be done to remedy it, but also his inability to figure out a way to make any real impact on the situation. As in the fairy tale, he may elaborately create a suit of clothes for the emperor, which leaves him as naked as before – while everyone joins the conspiracy of illusion to declare how resplendently the emperor has been dressed.

(p. 31)

Finally, some confirmation of the thoughts behind this book appears in the field of international management. This field asks to what extent national culture and its organizational culture should be given attention when seeking to respond to, or cause, behavior (Bozionelos & Wang, 2009). Culture and values influence the behavior of members of any national community, including teachers and principals’ attitudes toward schools, schooling, management, instruction, and so forth. This means that principals and teachers in one culture may respond in a distinctively different manner to their environment from their counterparts in another culture. Mead and Andrews (2009) argued that “culture is always likely to be an influence on how an organization responds to its environment and structures, roles, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Why we need an alternative view of reform in developing countries
• 2 The characteristics of neoliberal reforms in educational systems worldwide
• 3 Conceptual models of modernity versus traditionalism: the colorful portrait of the developing world
• 4 The failure of educational reforms in developing countries
• 5 The communitarian perspective and education
• 6 Major educational ideologies in developing countries
• 7 The key role of the local community in educational reform
• 8 Reform implementation in practice
• 9 Reform management in the school
• 10 Towards a new conceptualization of education reforms in developing countries
• Epilogue
• References
• Index