Publications

The school-autonomy-with-accountability reform in Iceland: looking back and making sense
By: Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Kolfinna Jóhannesdóttir & Berglind Rós Magnúsdóttir

The study examines the selective adoption of the school-autonomy-with-accountability (SAWA) reform at upper secondary school level in Iceland. It draws on a review of policy documents (acts, amendments to acts, regulations) and interviews with 17 individuals, including four former ministers of education that served over the period 1995-2017. The authors identify three distinct reform waves: a general public management reform (NPM) implemented across all sectors (1991 – 1995), the school autonomy reform (1995-2009), and the school-autonomy-with-soft-accountability reform (2009-2015). The sequence explains why opening up to the private sector during NPM required all line ministries to come up with clearly defined tasks and expected outcomes and why the third wave was an attempt to (minimally) reregulate the sector. The proliferation of standardized testing, a feature of SAWA in many other countries, did not occur in Iceland. Strikingly, the argument for autonomy was from the onset linked to diversity, that is, enabling upper secondary schools to respond to students’ diverse needs and interests and thereby reduce student drop. The study attempts to demonstrate the importance of the temporal dimension of policy transfer such as, for example, the timing, tempo, sequence and duration of adopted policies.

Coherence and fragmentation: Global influences on Nordic and East Asian teacher policies
By: Hansol Woo, Gerald K. LeTendre, Kristina Brezicha, Ulrika Bergmark & Saki Ikoma

We investigated patterns of teacher policy reforms in eight countries – Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic group and Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan in East Asia. Using the Reforms Finder of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Education Reform Database (WERD) to identify teacher-related reforms, we found all nations focused on the improvement of teacher quality as a common vision for education, but no nation implemented a “coherent” set of policies that addressed all phases of teacher professional trajectories. Some regional effects in policy emphasis with regard to education, certification, working conditions and long-term professional development were noted.

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.

Education reform in the twenty-first century: declining emphases in international organisation reports, 1998–2018
By: Patricia Bromley, Lisa Overbey, Jared Furuta and Rie Kijima

The liberal and neoliberal world order is increasingly under attack. Global levels of democracy have been declining for over a decade, accompanied by rollbacks in some kinds of rights. We examine the implications of increasing criticisms of the (neo)-liberal era over time for educational reform discourse around the world by drawing on a unique primary dataset of 473 reports produced by international organisations between 1998 and 2018. Extending insights from neo-institutional theories of organisations, we argue that globalised models of education reform is on a decline as a result of growing attacks on the (neo)-liberal cultural system that has affected education policies around the world. Empirically, we find no evidence that reform emphases continue to grow since the 1990s, and support for arguments that predict stagnant or falling levels of reform discourse.