Research
Featured Publications
Data as the New Panacea: Trends in Global Education Reforms, 1970-2018
By: Patricia Bromley, Tom Nachtigal & Rie Kijima
This paper investigates changes in the promissory visions articulated in education reforms around the world. We use structural topic modeling to inductively analyze the content of 9,268 reforms from 215 countries and territories during the period 1970–2018 using the World Education Reform Database. Our findings reveal a decline in traditional management-focused reforms and a rise in reforms related to data and information. We also find an expanding commitment to educational access and inclusion, but reforms framed explicitly in ‘rights’ language diminish. We argue that the rise of data-centric reforms and the retreat from rights-based approaches may both reflect and contribute to a broader erosion of the liberal world order.
*Link to Github page here
Human Rights and Human Capital Discourse in National Education Reforms, 1960-2018
By: Minju Choi
National governments rely on human rights and human capital rationales to justify why they seek to improve education through reform. Human rights discourse emphasizes a legal and moral right to education, whereas human capital discourse stresses the instrumental role of education in enhancing individual and national economic productivity. In contrast with arguments that view human rights and human capital as conflicting or competing philosophies, this paper considers the extent to which countries adopt both types of discourse in education reform in the same year, using a cross-national and longitudinal dataset of education reforms from 1960 to 2018. I demonstrate that human rights and human capital reform discourse both expand globally over time. I also argue that countries with human rights discourse are more likely to adopt human capital discourse in their national education reforms in the same year and vice versa, proposing they are not as contradictory as perceived.
Global Determinants of Education Reform, 1960-2017
By: Patricia Bromley, Jared Furuta, Rie Kijima, Lisa Overbey, Minju Choi & Heitor Santos
Since post-World War II and especially throughout the 1990s, the globalization of a liberal international order propelled a wave of education reforms around the world. However, recent challenges to the legitimacy of the liberal order may undercut the prevalence of education reform across countries. To reveal how global changes are influencing education, we draw on a newly constructed data set of 6,696 education reforms in 147 countries from 1960 to 2017. Using dynamic negative binomial panel regression models, we find declining levels of reform in recent decades. We also find evidence of changing dynamics of influence among prominent organizational actors: World Bank lending is less associated with education reform over time, whereas the influence of international nongovernmental organizations has grown. This suggests a shifting system of governance, where formal coercive pressures become less palatable and the normative influences of civil society grow stronger. Overall, our findings indicate that education reform arises as a macro-global process as much as a response to local needs and conditions.
*Listen to a FreshEd podcast about this research: https://freshedpodcast.com/bromley/.
What’s in a Wave? The Content of Neoliberal Education Reforms, 1970-2018
By: Lisa Overbey
This chapter presents empirical results of an analysis of the content of education reform globally in nine policy areas during the recent wave of neoliberal reforms between 1970 and 2018. It draws on data from the World Education Reform Database, the most comprehensive database to date of education reforms around the world. The results of this research show a significant increase globally in policy discourse prioritizing the improvement of educational quality and a decline in reform discourse around expanding access to education. The results also show a significant rise of reforms in policy areas related to accountability discourse. Overall, the descriptive trends presented in this chapter complement case study literature on neoliberal education reform and suggests directions further cross-national research.
Events
Recordings from WERD mini-workshop
The WERD research group held a virtual mini-workshop on Thursday, February 1, 2024 at Stanford University. Patricia Bromley, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Doerr School of Sustainability and faculty director at PACS, opened the workshop with an overview of the WERD project. The workshop also featured the work of postdoctoral scholars, Jared Furuta and Lisa Overbey, doctoral students, Minju Choi, Heitor Santos, Jieun Song, Tom Nachtigal, and Marcia Yang, as well as research by Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Professor of Comparative and International Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia and Rie Kijima, Assistant Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. The workshop was supported by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS).