Educational Policy and the Politics of Change

Miriam Henry, Bob Lingard, Fazal Rizvi, Sandra Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135098193
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Governments around the world are trying to come to terms with new technologies, new social movements and a changing global economy. As a result, educational policy finds itself at the centre of a major political struggle between those who see it only for its instrumental outcomes and those who see its potential for human emancipation.
This book is a successor to the best-selling Understanding Schooling (1988). It provides a readable account of how educational policies are developed by the state in response to broader social, cultural, economic and political changes which are taking place. It examines the way in which schools live and work with these changes, and the policies which result from them.
The book examines policy making at each level, from perspectives both inside and outside the state bureaucracy. It has a particular focus on social justice.
Both undergraduate and postgraduate students will find that this book enables them to understand the reasoning behind the changes they are expected to implement. It will help to prepare them to confront an uncertain educational world, whilst still retaining their enthusiasm for education.

Chapter 1

---

The policy phenomenon

---

Much of the collective effort of policy makers, researchers and administrators is aimed at making the school reality conform to the rational model. We then bemoan the fact that the schools fail to conform to the model. It just may be that we need a new paradigm.

(Arthur Wise 1984: 86)

INTRODUCTION

This book is concerned with issues of policy in education. We are interested in discussing a whole range of questions. What is policy? What, if anything, is distinctive about educational policy? How do educational policies affect us as parents, teachers, students, administrators and citizens? How is policy made and by whom? How are policies implemented? And how should they be analysed and evaluated? As we will see, these are complex questions to which there are no easy answers. The issues they raise have been much debated over the past three decades, because the way we think about educational policy making is linked to the ideological or philosophical positions we hold, not only in relation to education, but also to the nature of civil society. More specifically, they are linked to our beliefs concerning the manner in which the decisions about education should be made and implemented. The study of policy thus represents a highly contested field.

Let us begin with the concept of ‘policy’, now a widely used word in our vocabulary. According to the Oxford Dictionary, policy means ‘plan of action’ or ‘statement of aims of ideals’. In everyday language, we often use the word policy to refer to the promises we make to ourselves — such as in the sentence, ‘My policy is never to lend money to anyone.’ But this is not the kind of policy we will be examining in this book. Our concern is not with personal policies but with policies made by organisations. However, the scope of this book has some further limitations. We are concerned with public policies, that is, those policies which are made on behalf of the state by its various instrumentalities to steer the conduct of individuals, such as teachers or students, and organisations, such as schools or universities. We are thus interested in those aspects of governmental activity that are positive and directional, as distinct from the activities of private enterprise which are often motivated by self-interest alone.

This book focusses, then, on public sector activity in education, though later we will suggest that the distinction between public and private has become less clear in recent years. Nevertheless, it is useful to look at the distinction which is ideally drawn between the public and private sectors. The public sector represents a group of institutions which rely in some way on, or justify their activities in terms of, the authority of the state. At the same time, the public sector is more exposed to political direction and scrutiny than the private sector. It is characterised by public accountability, which extends to the performance of all state functions, and is enforced in a variety of ways ranging from the administrative to the electoral. Theoretically, at least, the public sector is based on the principle of equality of treatment of citizens. The concepts of ownership of enterprise and profit have been traditionally missing from the public sector. Finally, the idea of a public sector embodies the principle that all public authority must only be used in the public interest. In contrast, individuals and companies in the private sector can usually do anything that is not forbidden by the law to maximise their personal advantage.

If private sector activity is motivated largely by profit, then what is the motivation for the development of public policies in education? One answer to this question may be that public policies in education exist in order to ensure that education occurs in the public interest. Before mass schooling, education was a private business available only to a small section of the community. But since the creation of government schools for whole populations — a trend which began in nineteenth-century Europe and which is captured in the phrase ‘mass schooling’ — public policies in education have stipulated the conditions under which schools must operate. The earliest policies in education outlined a range of requirements that governed the administration of government schools. These included not only prescriptions for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment but also such matters as the conditions of teacher employment and the physical maintenance of school buildings, as well as the requirements concerning student attendance. Many of these policies were written down in documents that teachers and administrators needed to consult in order to perform their duties. Public policies in education thus had two main functions: to provide an account of those cultural norms which were considered by the state as desirable in education; and to institute a mechanism of accountability against which student and teacher performance could be measured.

These remain two of the most important functions of educational policies. However, since the 1960s, policies in social areas, including education, have increasingly performed yet another significant function: that of marshalling and managing public calls for change, giving them form and direction. As society has become more complex, and interest groups more assertive, governments have had to construct policies which attempt to respond effectively to their demands. Educational policy has thus become a bureaucratic instrument with which to administer the expectations that the public has of education. Stephen Kemmis (1990b: 1) has suggested that policy is increasingly replacing educational theory as a source of guidance for practitioners. What Kemmis means by this is that education is no longer discussed in terms of broad visions and ideals but in terms of what governments believe to be possible and often expedient, and what interest groups feel they can persuade governments to do. The language of educational policy, according to Kemmis, is thus linked to political compromises between competing but unequal interests.

Many of the most significant changes in educational policies over the past thirty years or so have been due to the political work of organised social movements like the civil rights movement and the women's movement. Each of these movements has been dissatisfied with the role education plays in the maintenance of the existing social order. Each has exerted a considerable amount of pressure for change. Thus, in the 1960s, calls for action on poverty and other social inequalities faced by women, minorities and people with disabilities led governments in most developed countries to formulate a swag of policies and programmes in education which sought to provide greater equality of educational opportunity. New policies were developed to cater for the increasing number of students who wanted to stay longer in schooling, partly as a vehicle for social mobility. In line with changing social values, a more social welfarist policy regime in education was established — but only after a long political struggle. The economic context also favoured the development of these policies, as new industries established after the Second World War matured into making large profits, giving nations revenue they needed to expand educational provision.

However, the social democratic settlement in education, as it has been called, never did enjoy universal public support. Those opposed to its universal access orientation seized upon the economic difficulties most Western countries have faced since the mid-1970s to call for a different way of funding and organising education. As a result, many of the achievements of the 1960s and 1970s have begun to be eroded as, in changed economic circumstances, new policy regimes are established, guided by a different set of interests exerting influence on governments — though perhaps more so in the UK and the US under conservative governments than in Australia under Labour governments. Thus while it might have been difficult to imagine how educational policies that resulted in greater equality of access and opportunity, in recognition of women and minority rights, could be abandoned, many past initiatives have been disbanded, especially in the UK and the US. Even in Australia, a great deal has already happened to suggest that many of these social democratic reforms in education are now being watered down and made secondary to the economic agendas for education. For example, the idea of a curriculum more responsive to cultural diversity, enshrined in the notion of multiculturalism, has been attacked. Global economic restructuring has led to calls for the creation of an educational system more responsive to the changing labour market needs of nations. The collapse in the youth labour market has led to calls for educational policies designed to ensure greater student retention in senior secondary schools and curricula that are more vocationally responsive.

Economic restructuring has not, however, been the only factor responsible for a changed policy climate in education. Technological changes have also demanded revision to educational policy, and in particular to curriculum priorities and pedagogical styles. If the emergence of new technologies has changed the patterns of everyday life and powerfully restructured work and leisure as dramatically as many suggest, then education cannot remain oblivious to these changes. Similarly, changes in social attitudes towards authority, particularly among young people, have also created new pressures for education. As Willis (1990) has argued, students brought up on the cultural values of the globalised mass media are unlikely to be comfortable with the requirements of bureaucratically defined regimes of discipline. Such cultural and attitudinal changes have demanded policy shifts in education.

At the same time, people are no longer prepared to leave policy making to politicians and bureaucrats. They wish to be involved in the steering of policy processes. Powerful social movements have developed over the past few decades which demand democratic engagement in policy processes. These movements form alliances to pressure systems and organisations to change, to ensure that policy makers do not ignore their voice. For example, the feminist movement will not permit issues of gender inequalities in education to drop off the state's policy agenda. Similarly, indigenous groups and ethnic minorities want a direct say in the policy making processes. This in itself constitutes a major cultural change which no discussion of educational policy can afford to ignore.

What this brief discussion indicates is that educational policies do not emerge in a vacuum but reflect compromises between competing interests expressed by the dominant interests of capitalism on the one hand and the oppositional interests of various social movements on the other. While it is true that policies are responses to particular social changes, it is also the case that these changes may themselves be represented in a variety of different ways, and accorded contrasting significance. Recent educational policy initiatives may thus be viewed as responses to the struggle over particular constructions of social, political, economic and cultural changes. The state itself puts forward its policy initiatives in the rhetorical language of reform, often presented as the only plausible response to the social and economic changes described. Indeed, the term ‘reform’ has become one of the most over-used ideas in the political vocabulary. It presupposes legitimacy and invites support for the ideas propagated in the particular policy. In this way, therefore, the state is not neutral with respect to the changes occurring in society, and its own interest in sponsoring some changes and preventing others is reflected in policy.

References to change have now become ubiquitous in politics and policy. At the same time few, if any, policies are entirely new: most are shaped by the characteristics of previous policies. As Hogwood and Peters note: ‘Policies are rarely written on a tabula rasa but rather on a well-occupied and even crowded tablet of existing laws, organisations and clients’ (1983: 1). Policy is thus an instrument through which change is mapped onto existing policies, programmes or organisations, and onto the demands made by particular interest groups. To put forward a policy is to acknowledge that a new policy was needed or that the old policy needed to be revised in response to the changes occurring in society.

However, this is not the only way in which change and policy are related. While it is possible to initiate, to put on to the public agenda, issues that are poorly understood or ignored and to bring about or implement change with the development of new policies, it is also possible to use policy as an instrument with which to exclude certain issues from the realm of public debate; or indeed resist certain claims made by interest groups. With policy it is also possible to articulate, re-articulate or institutionalise the manner in which particular issues might be understood. In short, policies serve to manage change, but exactly how this management occurs varies greatly from policy to policy and site to site. The relationship between policy and change is indeed complex. In this book, our aim is to provide an introduction to educational policy studies which highlights some of the ways in which the ideas of policy and change are related.

VIGNETTES: POLICIES IN PRACTICE

To explore the relationship between policy and change, we want to begin with a series of vignettes of education policy making in a number of different policy domains and settings to demonstrate some of the complexities of education policy and policy analysis. The vignettes are located in our experience as teachers of educational policy in the various States of Australia, but we have little doubt that they apply equally to the experiences of policy making in other Western countries as well. They are illustrative of policy experiences, and attempt to show the various ways in which education policy is received and enacted by practitioners, and the various ways in which it is produced, disseminated and implemented. They demonstrate the value-laden nature of policy making and policy analysis, and highlight the various levels at which education policy making occurs and the links which exist between education policy and other policy fields. They also demonstrate the significance for policy analysis of the location of the analyst.

The first of the vignettes concerns teachers' experience of policy. We begin with a story of a teacher because many education policies end up in schools: on principals' desks, buried in libraries, in teachers' pigeon holes, the subject of innumerable staff meetings. Teachers are expected to put these policies into practice, so the issue of the ways in which teachers understand policies is of utmost importance.

Mark's story

Mark has been teaching in an inner-city primary school in New South Wales for more than fifteen years. He has always regarded himself as a highly committed teacher who, in the mid-1980s, participated actively in the work of his union. He enjoyed teaching and felt himself to be at the vanguard of the social democratic reforms in education which were being attempted in the 1980s. But in the last few years things have begun to go wrong, so much so that Mark now considers the profession he joined has been totally transformed — for the worse. He believes that the system no longer supports the educational values to which he is committed. At the same time, the attempts by governments to ‘reform’ education with a plethora of policies which are simply ‘thrown at’ teachers, has made teaching unattractive to him. In the State of New South Wales, the educational bureaucracy has been restructured no less than three times in the past ten years. Curriculum advisers upon whom he could rely are no longer available as curriculum has been continually revised. Class sizes have increased significantly. New assessment regimes have also been introduced which serve in a real sense to undermine the professionalism of teachers.

Of course, Mark recognises that changes in society demand new educational policies, but what concerns him is the confused way in which policy shifts are explained to teachers who have to implement them, and the manner in which teachers have effectively been frozen out of policy making processes. Mark finds the current rhetoric of devolution particularly confusing because it promises responsibility for decision making to be devolved to the school level, and yet, from his point of view, it has placed more restrictions on teachers' work than ever before. Severe financial cut-backs have produced an intensification of teachers' work. The morale at his school is particularly low, and many of his friends have already left teaching. What concerns Mark the most is that whereas once the economic and vocational uses of schooling were just part of its purpose, they are now vaunted as its primary purpose. He feels that the cultural and critical role of education in the transformation of society is now being diminished.

Mark's story raises a number of issues concerning policy processes in education. To begin with, it raises the question of who should determine education policy and what role should teachers play in policy processes. In recent years, teachers have increasingly felt excluded from processes of policy development, as the system seeks to make stringent demands on them for greater accountability to externally devised policies. They are expected to produce change of the kind prescribed by particular policies, but are seldom given an opportunity to explore these policies in relation to their own values and traditions. Their understanding of policies is therefore often either limited or skewed, and what is subsequently produced in practice often bears little resemblance to the original intentions. Policies are thus often refracted to suit local circumstances. While many feel anxious about how new policies might have implications for their practice, others simply reject the idea that policies are important and thus find little reason to change existing practices. These features highlight some of the limitations of the so-called rational model of educational change which separates policy processes into two distinct stages of policy development and policy implementation. This model assumes that, given a set of perfect conditions, policies can produce the desired outcomes. But given human diversity and organisational complexity, this assumption is fundamentally flawed. Implementation can never be achieved in a vacuum. Since policies are part of a social environment, they can be expected to be ignored, resisted, contested or rearticulated to suit local circumstances. Mark's story thus underlines the political nature of policy processes and the compromises between different interests which are involved. This applies to all public policy making, but in education it is particularly relevant because the purposes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The policy phenomenon
• 2 What is policy?
• 3 Doing policy analysis
• 4 Globalisation, the state and education policy making
• 5 Educational restructuring
• 6 Putting education to work
• 7 Difference, social justice and educational policy
• 8 The politics of educational change
• References
• Index