School Governance in Global Contexts

Trends, Challenges and Practices

Nicholas Sun Keung PANG, Philip Wing Keung CHAN, Nicholas Sun Keung PANG, Philip Wing Keung CHAN

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000510263
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Éducation comparative

The edited volume provides multiple lens to view school governance practices, exploring its modernization, ethical review, future trend, as well as the reciprocal influence of educational policy.Drawing on a wide-spread experience in the field of education governance from leading scholars, emerging scholars, doctoral research students and school principals, this book includes insights from 11 countries and economies across four continents: Asia, Europe, North America and Oceanic. Most of them are high achievers in the OECD's PISA 2018 worldwide ranking in mathematics, science and reading. The book not only lifts to the forefront school governance educational thinking, but also acknowledges their complex evolution, especially under the current impact of COVID-19 Pandemic.This book will be of interest to academics, professionals and policymakers in education and school governance, and any scholars who engage in historical studies of education and debates about educational governance.

1 Stocktaking school governance in a globalized and complex world

Nicholas Sun Keung Pang and Philip Wing Keung Chan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003221456-2

Introduction

Globalization is a product of the emergence of a global economy. The term “globalization” is generally used to refer to a complicated set of economic, political, and cultural factors. The process of globalization is seen as blurring national boundaries, shifting solidarities within and between nation-states, and deeply affecting the constitution of national and interest group identities (Morrow & Torres, 2000). It is widely believed that globalization is transforming the political, economic and cultural lives of people all around the world and that globalization is driving a revolution in the organization of work, the production of goods and services, relations among nations, and even local culture (Pang, 2006).

Globalization has brought a paradigm shift in educational management, administration and governance in many countries. Under the impacts of globalization, Mulford (2002) observes that the old-fashioned values of wisdom, trust, empathy, compassion, grace, and honesty in managing education have changed into those so-called values of contracts, markets, choice, and competition in educational governance and administration. At present, governments are probing more into the instrumental skills of efficiency, accountability and planning than the skills of collaboration and reciprocity.

Educational trends arisen from globalization

In the competitive global economy and environment, nation-states have no choice but to adjust themselves in order to be more efficient, productive, and flexible. To enhance a nation’s productivity and competitiveness in the global situation, decentralization and the creation of a “market” in education have been the two major strategies employed to restructure education (Lingard, 2000).

The following trends in educational governance and administration emerge when the impacts of globalization become more prominent since the last few decades (Cheng, 2005, pp. 169–174).

1. Most nation-states have taken a functionalist perspective of education reform as a means of supporting the economic, political and cultural development of society, and they have to propose new educational visions and long-terms aims to prepare their new generations for the future in a globally competitive environment (Trend 1).
2. Most nation-states have been making effort to expand their school education and improve enrollment to higher education, as well as, initiating structural changes that include reforming school governance and administration (Trend 2).
3. Most nation-states have been trying to shift the exclusive public funding model to marketization and privatization as approaches to expanding, diversifying and improving education (Trend 3).
4. Most nation-states have been taking decentralization in educational governance and administration moving from an external control to an institutional-based management for an effective use of resources and promoting human initiatives in education (Trend 4).
5. Most nation-states have been enforcing quality assurance initiatives to monitor educational quality and to promote equity (Trend 5).

These trends necessarily confront the traditional values and culture in the practice of educational governance and management in most countries which are open to the impacts of globalization.

Challenges in public education reform

OECD (2013) showed that the enrollment rate of children in public schools has been increasing in the last few decades. In 2003, on average across OECD countries, 83% of students attended government or public schools, 14% attended government-depended private schools and 4% attended government-independent private schools. In Indonesia, Mexico, Spain and Finland, a larger proportion of 15-year-old students attended public schools in 2012 than did in 2003. A similar shift in enrollment towards government-funded schools (an increase of 6%) was observed in Thailand, and, to a lesser degree, in Poland.

Public education reform faces some fundamental challenges. Successful reforms are not only about structural capacity and human resources establishment. Improving public education effectiveness is fundamentally political and shaped by the educational governance (Bukenya & Yanguas, 2013). Education reforms have to deal with complex contexts among the relationships of administration, management, leadership, teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment. Moreover, we know that fundamental changes to educational and institutional features, for example, staff capacity and organizational culture take times (Lange & Rueschemeyer, 2005). This poses challenges for how educational governance to be designed and implemented in a specific context.

The complexity of education systems

Education systems are, in fact, complex systems. Education itself is not a private business, but has involved stakeholders, such as, the government and bureaucrats, employers, taxpayers, policy makers, school administrators, teachers, parents and students, who have all invested in education with interests. The stakeholders are networks of interdependently linked actors whose actions affect all other actors. Complex systems do not work in a linear manner but characterized with tipping points, feedback loops, path dependence and sensibility to local contexts (Snyder, 2013). Understanding complexity is important for school governance and reform, as complex systems cannot be successfully governed with the simple, linear thinking and one-size-fit-all policy. The increased complexity in governance arrangements, accompanied by a rise in the number of stakeholders and in the availability and use of evaluation and accountability data, calls for a new approach to governance (Burns & Köster, 2016).

The study by OECD (2016) shows that many OECD countries in respond to the challenges arisen from globalization have decentralized in school governance, giving schools and concerned stakeholders greater autonomy to respond more interactively to school contexts and needs. It is evident that with the greater availability of student achievement information in the movement of quality assurance and school accountability, parents, students, and teachers nowadays have become more demanding and involved in decision-making about education. They would ask for a greater degree of transparency in school governance and school be holding greater accountability for student performance.

School governance must remain flexible enough to learn different stakeholders’ expectations and adapt to specific contexts that nurture the legitimacy of school policy and administration. Constant feedback is required to guide the complex systems to reform in school governance. Simply devolving power to local authorities may not improve the effectiveness of school governance unless it is accompanied by attention to the connections and interactivity in the specific context (OECD, 2016, p. 109).

School governance is a complex process which involves a substantial number of stakeholders inside and outside the government administration, interacting with each other in many different ways (Burns and Köster, 2016). Depending on their paradigms in school governance, nation-states of different countries may be categorized in a dichotomy of centralization or decentralization. Whether within a centralized or decentralized education system, school governance often does so across several levels of governance and with different short- and long-term goals. Relationships among these stakeholders are increasingly dynamic and interconnected. So, a central question for school governance is how education systems can provide high-quality educational opportunities for all in this challenging environment.

There is a need to develop flexible and adaptive governance processes for more effective and lasting reform in today’s complex education systems. When nation-states develop smarter governance arrangements, sensitive to context and capable of delivering improvement by building upon robust knowledge systems, stakeholder involvement and meaningful accountability, the more successful will be the education systems in nurturing competitiveness in student performance.

With the 14 showcases of school governance in different countries or economies in this book, readers can adopt the perspective of complexity theory (Burns, Köster, & Fuster, 2016) to:

• make sense of the functioning of systems in school governance;
• conceptualize systems as being defined by the relationships between their constituent elements;
• display characteristics that emerge from those components interacting dynamically with each other;
• analyze how the various interconnections form a coherent whole;
• examine in what way existing processes facilitate or hinder this coherence; and
• foresee how best to develop new forms of governance that take this complexity into account.

Governance works without government

Rosenau and Czempiel (1992) argued that governance can work without government. Then, what is the different between governance and government in concepts? According to Rosenau (1992, pp. 4–5), governance is not synonymous with government. He argued that both refer to purposive behavior, goal-oriented activities, and systems of rule.

While government suggests activities that are backed by formal authority, by police powers to insure the implementation of duly constituted policies, whereas governance refers to activities backed by shared goals that may or may not derive from legal and formally prescribed responsibilities and that do not necessarily rely on police powers to overcome defiance and attain compliance.

(Rosenau, 1992, p. 2)

Governance, in other words, is a more encompassing phenomenon than government. Governance emphasizes informal, non-governmental forces that drive people moving ahead, satisfying their needs, and fulfilling their wants. So that, governance is a system of rule that works only if it is accepted by the stakeholders or participants concerned, whereas governments may function in widespread opposition to policies. Governments, on the other hand, can be quite ineffective without being regarded as non-existent. Thus it is possible to conceive of governance without government.

The definition of governance

Windzio, Sackmann and Martens (2005, p. 2) define governance as a specific form of coordination of social actions characterized by institutionalized, binding regulations and enduring patterns of interaction. Different forms of governance can be grouped between the extremes of centralization and decentralization in control. In centralization, the control is exercised with authoritative decision-making by governmental actors, while in decentralization, the control is institutionalized with self-regulation with participation of concerned stakeholders and cooperation of governmental, private, and various collective actors. Based on the patterns of interactive independence of the actors concerned, Windzio, Sackmann and Martens (2005, p. 2) claimed that governance may take the forms of market, state and network with the following characteristics:

1. market, that is, decentralized decision-making with a coordinating price mechanism;
2. state, that is, hierarchical with intentional steering as the coordinating element; and
3. network, that is, self-determination with associations and negotiation systems as coordinators.

A typical public school governance structure

The functions of public schools serve to establish the intellectual, communal, and even moral climate for the future of the nation. Public school gov...