Educational Policies
Educational policies refer to the guidelines, laws, and regulations set by governments or educational institutions to shape the structure and delivery of education. These policies often address issues such as curriculum development, funding, teacher training, and student assessment. They aim to ensure quality education, equal opportunities, and the overall improvement of the education system.
5 Key excerpts on "Educational Policies"
eBook - ePub- Stuart Nagel, Stuart Nagel(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
...First, educational policy making is characterized by extraordinary complexity, with thousands of participants working in a staggering array of structural settings. It is laden with its own cultural history, its own legal precedents, its own financial and political arrangements, and its own jargon. It is, in short, a field so vast and varied that attempting to develop some understanding of its nature taxes the abilities of most scholars. A second characteristic of educational policy is the visibility of the educational system and most policy deliberations. By virtue of the simple fact that almost all citizens have been to school and many also have children in school, most believe they have special insight into the realm of education policy. Whereas large segments of the population escape direct contact with the national defense establishment or the public welfare system, relatively few avoid an intimate experience with schooling at some point. Citizens’ exposure to schools, and that of their progeny, heightens their awareness of educational issues (although, in most cases, their knowledge remains limited), and their own experiences color their orientations toward educational policy. The adage in educational circles is that everyone is an “expert” about school policy. There is an underlying distrust of professional expertise that contradicts conventional wisdom and a possessiveness about the operation of public schools that obtains in few other policy sectors. Third, education, perhaps more than any other policy field, is marked by a dispersion of authority (Halperin, 1978). Policy is not only formulated and implemented at multiple levels, but there is also an intricate distribution of authority within levels. U.S. elementary and secondary education policy is made and carried out in a system remarkably disjointed from the policy system for postsecondary education...
eBook - ePub- Fazal Rizvi, Bob Lingard(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Conceptions of education policy Introduction Policy studies is a relatively recent field of academic endeavour. It emerged during the 1950s in mainly liberal democratic countries, where governments sought the resources of the social sciences to develop public policies, replacing earlier approaches that were largely intuitive and ad hoc. Fifty years later, policy studies has become an established field of study, central to the ways in which societies are now governed. Governments now employ a large number of policy experts to help them think through social problems, develop programmes and assess their effectiveness. Policy experts are also used to justify and promote political decisions, helping to steer social formations in particular directions. In this sense, policy studies as a field is inextricably linked to the processes of change. Especially in its more technical and bureaucratic forms, it has even come to replace politics, sidelining debates about values, shifting attention instead to matters of administrative dictates and directions. In the early stages of its development, policy studies was grounded mostly in ‘policy sciences’, an approach developed by political scientists to enquire into the ways in which public policies were best developed, implemented and evaluated (de Leon and Danielle 2007). Policy studies thus largely addressed the needs of the state, helping it to develop its priorities and programmes and determine ways of ensuring their efficiency and effectiveness. Governments believed that the intractable problems they faced could only be solved through the rigorous application of research knowledge and techniques developed by social scientists...
- Colin Griffin(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It also indicates a need for much more of the kind of sociological anaysis which tends to be ‘value-critical’ of received, commonsense or ‘taken-for-granted’ practice than do those disciplines which have so far been most influential in the formation of adult education theory. And certainly, in his own considered definition of social policy Townsend sees sociological analysis as being important: Policy analysis must therefore depend on a broad sociological perspective about both objectives and means. Social policy is best conceived as a kind of blueprint for the management of society towards social ends: it can be defined as the underlying as well as the professed rationale by which social institutions and groups are used or brought into being to ensure social preservation or development. Social policy is, in other words, the institutionalized control of services, agencies and organizations to maintain or change social structure and values. Sometimes this control may be utterly conscious, and consciously expressed by Government spokesmen and others. Sometimes it may be unspoken and even unrecognized. 21 As with Rein, Town send tends to stress social policy as an outcome of conflicts of interest and principle among different social groups, including professional groups more or less directly concerned with implementation, and to see apparently technical arguments about means as in reality forms of ideological conflict. One way of illustrating conflict is by constructing models along the lines of Pinker’s distinction between ‘residual’ and ‘institutional’ models of social welfare policy. This, it was argued, was a way of thinking which may be suggestive for a curriculum analysis of adult education...
eBook - ePubEducation in China
Philosophy, Politics and Culture
- Janette Ryan(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...2 Formal and Informal Education: Policies, Structures, Governance and Contexts The CCP has control over all levels and aspects of public education in China. China has the largest education system in the world with, in 2015–16, 260 million students and over 15 million teachers in over half a million schools (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2016). China needs to increase its educational capacity and quality to achieve the central government's political and economic goal to move from a manufacturing to an innovative, high-tech knowledge economy, with the subsequent need for a highly skilled workforce. It particularly lacks capacity and expertise in the areas of early childhood, vocational and higher education. At the same time, it is challenged by a growing urban–rural divide as well as growing inequalities between wealthier and poorer areas and different socioeconomic groups (discussed more fully in Chapter 4), all of which can jeopardize the future social stability and economic growth of the nation. These provide a backdrop to the broad and sweeping curriculum reforms taking place at all levels of education. This chapter describes efforts by governments to build capacity in this context, in a nation with ambitious goals for its educational attainments. The following also provides an overview of China's Educational Policies, governance and funding mechanisms, all of which exist within a culture of intense competition and individual aspirations, and high stakes testing. It describes China's formal education systems at preschool, school, vocational, and higher education levels, and the place of schools and teachers in this system. It also considers the role of adult and lifelong learning in China and other, more informal, systems of learning such as extra-curricular activities and private tutoring...
eBook - ePub- Carlo Raffo, Alan Dyson, Helen Gunter, Dave Hall, Lisa Jones, Afroditi Kalambouka, Carlo Raffo, Alan Dyson, Helen Gunter, Dave Hall, Lisa Jones, Afroditi Kalambouka(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...live. In a sense much universal educational provision is located within a dominant neo-liberal agenda that provides few opportunities or openings for different sources and patterns of curricular and pedagogic policy development associated with the civic project for social democratic development. The second reason is that universal school-focused developments generally do not recognise factors at work at other levels of analysis. They rarely appreciate how the forces of globalisation are impacting on certain communities and creating social disparities, nor do they see what Smyth documents in Chapter 5 of how schools and education might take part in the re-developments of those communities through various regeneration initiatives and democratically engaged activity. Schools generally do not see themselves as an embedded part of social and economic policy but merely there to uncritically contribute to it. In addition, and as Maguire notes in Chapter 10, school-focused research and policy rarely recognises how poverty and the spatial context within which it manifests itself generates constrained levels of decision-making and choice in the changing transition experiences of young people living in poverty. But what of priority educational policy initiatives that are arguably more closely targeted at those young people, communities, and schools most disadvantaged? The FSES initiative, in its various guises, is arguably one of the most ambitious priority Educational Policies. Its most general aim, pertinent to various international examples of the genre, is not only to deal with at-risk young people in challenging schools, but to also intervene and support families and communities within which these young people are located, recognising how multiple barriers can impact on educational achievement. FSES are expected to intervene in the multiple problems which beset children, families, and communities living in disadvantage...
