Handbook of Global Education Policy

Karen Mundy, Andy Green, Bob Lingard, Antoni Verger, Karen Mundy, Andy Green, Bob Lingard, Antoni Verger

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119221838, 9781118468050
• eBook ISBN: 9781118468043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This innovative new handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the ways in which domestic education policy is framed and influenced by global institutions and actors.

• Surveys current debates about the role of education in a global polity, highlights key transnational policy actors, accessibly introduces research methodologies, and outlines global agendas for education reform
• Includes contributions from an international cast of established and emerging scholars at the forefront of the field thoughtfully edited and organized by a team of world-renowned global education policy experts
• Each section features a thorough introduction designed to facilitate readers' understanding of the subsequent material and highlight links to interdisciplinary global policy scholarship
• Written in an accessible and engaging style that will appeal to domestic and international policy practitioners, social scientists, and education scholars alike

Part I
Education and a Global Polity

Part I Introduction

Andy Green

Part I provides an introductory overview of the key contemporary debates concerning educational globalization and global education policy. The chapters consider the origins and drivers of educational globalization from the 1980s onwards; the processes through which global policy discourses emerge and are (selectively) adopted and transformed in national settings; and how far this is leading to convergence in education policy across the world. A number of chapters elaborate and evaluate some of the major theories and concepts that inform global education policy: including human capital theory and the role of skills in economic growth and poverty reduction; notions of educational quality, accountability, and good governance; and the discourses around privatization, cost-efficiency, and cost-sharing in education. Critical perspectives are offered on the dominant global policy discourses on human capital and gender equity in schooling; as well as on the claims made regarding the effectiveness of the policies of the global education reform movement on school accountability, diversity, and choice, and the use of competitive quasi-markets in education. The part ends with an examination of the evolution of the diverse types of skills formation systems found in Europe, thus returning the discussion to the questions raised in the first chapter about the continuing salience of national education policy-making in the face of policy globalization, and thus the limits of policy convergence.

The first three chapters provide contrasting accounts of the processes of educational globalization. In the first chapter, Martin Carnoy explores the origins of educational globalization and the relation of global education policy to national decision-making in education. Assuming that policy-makers act rationally to achieve favored goals within given constraints, and that educational policies and objectives tend to be contested at the national level, Carnoy argues that global policy develops primarily due to different national elites adopting similar solutions to a number of common problems facing education in different countries. Ideological convergence amongst global elites also arises to some extent out of the diffusion of dominant notions of modernity, but only where these are functional to elite interests. Intensified global economic competition since the 1980s, and the rise of the global “knowledge economy,” increases the importance of skills, research, and innovation in sustaining the national economic competitiveness upon which government legitimacy rests. At the same time governments face increasing budgetary pressures arising from the ageing of populations and the need to maintain internationally competitive taxation regimes. In order to meet the rising demand for skills and qualifications, from both students and enterprises, governments seek new ways to offset the rising costs of education to the state through various efficiency and cost sharing measures. Global policies for improving educational efficiency and quality – including through accountability regimes, the proliferation of educational testing, and the adoption of new technologies in education delivery – are adopted by national policy-makers as ways to solve these common problems. Yet, as Carnoy reminds us, national elites also have to respond to domestic political pressures, which can vary substantially between countries, and they may respond differently to the proffered global policy solutions. Global policy is thus adopted selectively, and not all policies converge at the national level.

The following chapter provides a quite different perspective on global policy development, which focuses less on different national contexts and attendant power relations that shape national responses to global policy. Writing within the tradition of World Culture Theory, Francisco Ramirez, John Meyer, and Julia Lerch present the development of global policy as a process of cultural diffusion, which they say is largely consensual and stateless in form. Global and national policy actors at different levels adopt similar policy discourses out of a desire to conform to global norms of modernity. In this model world society spontaneously develops a global discourse around the virtues of expanded, progressive, and internationalized education systems. Education is globally cast as a key to progress or excellence and justice or equality. Everywhere policy-makers promote increased participation at all levels of education; adopt curricula that seek to foster transnational citizenship and human rights; and adopt “dense” organizational control mechanisms to enhance the efficiency of their systems. A degree of “loose coupling” between global policy rhetoric and actual practice in national states is acknowledged as inevitable, but national variation in educational practice is seen not so much as evidence of continuing nation state efficacy in education policy-making, but rather as a necessary friction involved as powerful global policies are gradually infused into different contexts.

Antoni Verger reviews the variety of different perspectives on the emergence and adoption of global education policy, using privatization policy as a test case. Privatization policy – defined in its broadest terms to include private public partnerships and the contracting out of services, as well as full private ownership of schools – is taken to be an example of a pervasive global education reform approach that induces policy convergence at the national level, albeit around a broad array of policies. National policy-makers are seen to be key players in the process of global policy diffusion but Verger remains skeptical about rationalist claims that they act rationally and in the light of the evidence of what works. The normative emulation thesis of World Culture Theory pays attention to the power of ideas but is also criticized on the grounds that it takes insufficient account of the conflicting political interests at the national level and the processes through which global and national policy-making interact in setting education agendas. Drawing on theories of “critical constructivism” and “cultural political economy,” which stress the power relations underlying policy choices, the bounded nature policy rationalism, and the salience of the “semiotics of policy adoption,” Verger argues for a more detailed consideration of the interactions involved in the multi-scalar policy process and, particularly, for more attention to be paid to the complexities of policy adoption at the national level, with its key moments of policy selection, variation, and retention.

Chapter 4 addresses the key economic arguments underlying global education policy, in the form of the Human Capital Theory (HCT) claims about the contribution of skills to earnings, productivity, and growth. Reviewing the development of HCT and its impact on education policy since the 1960s, Erik Hanushek argues that economists wrongly assumed that schooling was the only source of learning and that the outcomes of learning that promote productivity and economic growth could be adequately measured by levels of school attainment or years of schooling. Substantial variation across countries in the quality of schooling meant that the measures were inadequate and, consequently, models based on them produced inconsistent results and the wrong policy conclusions. However, with the development of direct tests of skills – as in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys – it became possible to model the economic impact of the learning outcomes that matter most: cognitive skills. Summarizing his (and his co-authors’) path-breaking findings on skills and growth from 2000 onwards, Hanushek shows that it is the cognitive skills of the adult population, rather than their school attainments, that are most powerfully related to individual earnings, income distribution, and economic growth. Using international data on skills and growth from 1960 to 2000, he shows that the impact of skills on economic growth is much higher than that of school attainment. After controlling for skills, years of higher education have no impact on growth in either developing or developed countries. Claiming that these relationships are causal – despite the still limited skills data for developing countries – Hanushek argues that the results have profound implications for education policy, making the question of school quality the central issue.

Xavier Bonal provides a critique of HCT and its influence on policy in Chapter 5 that ranges well beyond issues of measurement. This chapter provides a detailed account of the evolution of HCT and its effects on global policies for poverty reduction since the 1960s, criticizing many of its core premises and the policies they have supported. From the start, argues Bonal, HCT made unsupported assumptions about human behavior and failed to take due account of the effects of institutions. At the micro level, the rational choice models of individual decision-making it employed ignored the influence of culture and non-instrumental determinants of individual decision-making, consequently underestimating ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: The Globalization of Education Policy – Key Approaches and Debates
• Part I: Education and a Global Polity
• Part II: Educational Issues and Challenges
• Part III: Global Policy Actors in Education
• Part IV: Critical Directions in the Study of Global Education Policy
• Name Index
• Place Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement