Reconstructing the emergence of Teach First: examining the role of policy entrepreneurs and networks in the process of policy transfer (original) (raw)
Related papers
Policy Transfer and Educational Change
2016
Policy Transfer and Educational Change touches upon a critical issue in the field of comparative and international education: the travel of educational ideas across jurisdictions. This book examines the reasons for India's failure to achieve school improvement through introducing foreign education reforms. The authors aim to develop and articulate a methodology, which they called a policy-learning model, to help future researchers, educators, and policy makers understand how policy ideas travel and influence educational practices within classrooms. The book is composed of seven chapters. Chapter one provides a theoretical background of the study, with a focus on the notions of policy implementation, education reform, and policy learning. To begin with, the authors indicate that institutional incapacity, in particular administration inertia, is a key problem, which has been ignored by the majority of literature discussing the effectiveness of policy implementation. By administration inertia, the authors refer to administrations' resistance to change. They argue that the primary function of educational administration in most developing countries, for example India in the case of this book, "is not to develop and/or implement educational policies, but to position leaders and groups using appropriate mechanisms to do so" (p. 4). Under this context, reforms or policy changes challenge existing institutional behaviours. Therefore, Scott, Terano, Slee, Husbands, and Wilkins propose the importance of understanding the existing education system and curricula, along with the policy discourses, contexts, and actors that have made policy-making "a 'messy', complex and contested enterprise" (p. 5). Adopting a historical perspective, the authors in chapter two explore the development of the education system in India. A shift has been observed from the traditional Hindu education focusing on the elitists to the successive governments' education policies emphasizing inclusiveness and the success of all students. In addition, the authors elaborate on the relationship between the central government and the states in India. The central government and state governments share responsibilities for education. The central government is responsible for policy-making, promoting innovation, and framework development. The state governments are actually running the education system. In the last section of this chapter, Scott et al. examine two major education reforms in India. Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), introduced in 2000, is a program aimed to achieve universal access to elementary education. This reform focuses on the notion of equity by emphasizing equal opportunities and meeting the needs of disadvantaged students. It is suggested that even this reform has led to greater access and enrollment rates at the primary stage of education, the drop-out rate of students from disadvantaged groups still remains high in India. The Right of Education (RTE) is another reform introduced in 2009. It adopts discourses such as "compulsory education", and specifies varies stakeholders' responsibilities in providing free and compulsory education for all children in India. However, the RTE is found difficult to implement due to local contexts especially in rural schools. Large pupil-teacher ratios, and lack of drinking water and usable toilet facilities are suggested as obstacles to achieve the goals listed in the RTE. Chapter three answers the questions about how and why certain education policy ideas travel well globally. The authors use Teach for All and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as examples to support their assertion that these widely adopted ideas share significant similarities such as
Learning lessons, policy transfer and the international diffusion of policy ideas
2001
The literature on policy transfer, diffusion and convergence as well as lesson drawing is burgeoning. The common theme among studies in this field is the concern with ‘knowledge about how policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political setting (past or present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political setting’ (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000: 5 my emphasis). With the specific focus on knowledge actors, this paper highlights the roles played by non-state actors who act as ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and interact with officials in government and international organisation in the international spread of ideas and information. Second, it suggests that transfer is a process that is often facilitated within networks. Third, incorporating concepts about social learning helps account for when transfer is effective or not. Finally, the discussion advocates a more global focus – rather than the focus on ...
The critical challenge: Policy networks and market models for education
Policy Futures in Education, 2018
This paper reviews a number of approaches to considering how policy transfers through advocacy networks, focusing on education issues in general, and market-based policies in particular. While policymakers and private funders are demanding evidence on the effectiveness of proposed interventions in education, it is not at all clear that they themselves consider evidence in promoting particular policies. Instead, as is apparent with policy proposals for market-based reforms, quite often it is not rigorous research that advances policies, but effective advocacy. Indeed, evidence indicates that an infrastructure of rapid production and dissemination of data has emerged through advocacy organizations and networks, often to obscure or produce alternative evidence. While critical theorists have noted for some time the expansion of neoliberal reform models in education, those analyses offer little in terms of understanding the mechanisms behind the expansion and proliferation of such policies, much less effective ways to challenge their growth. The paper highlights limitations of one of the most popular theoretical perspectives for understanding such networks, and notes how, in the marketplace of ideas represented by new policy advocacy networks, critical scholars are poor at packaging their message, especially compared to intermediary organizations. The paper concludes by introducing a framework of economic transaction for understanding policy transfer. In doing so, it offers a challenge for critical scholars hoping to influence education policymaking.
Policy Communities and Networks: Education Management and Governance
In a world of increasing globalization it is desirable for productive and successful countries to have a positive effect on the global society. It may be necessary to have policy communities inside and outside the country for this. To develop policies, governments require information from non-governmental sources. The recent emphasis on policy communities and networks is a result of the perceived role of these communities in policy development and implementation. The main influence of policy communities and networks may only be through generating, discussing, and promoting ideas to various groups. In this paper, we will discuss two contrasting approaches to policy communities and networks: those taken by Iran and Canada. In addition, we will examine how such countries could engage in policy borrowing to improve their effects on the global society.
Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary PolicyMaking
Governance-an International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions, 2000
In recent years there has been a growing body of literature within political science and international studies that directly and indirectly uses, discusses and analyzes the processes involved in lesson-drawing, policy convergence, policy diffusion and policy transfer. While the terminology and focus often vary, all of these studies are concerned with a similar process in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political setting (past or present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political setting.
Educational Review, 2018
This article addresses the question: how do a new cadre of teacher education providers in England, imbued in the discourses of the Global Education Reform Movement, construct the problem of a supposedly "failing" existing teacher education system associated with universities; what solutions to this problem do they propose and on what grounds; and how sound are their arguments? We make a rhetorical analysis of publicly available discourse from a "new rhetorical" perspective. We focus on one case in England: the Institute for Teaching (IFT), an organisation that has grown out an influential Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) and that models itself on independent Graduate Schools of Education in the USA, such as Relay. We examine the emergence of the IFT as a case of policy entrepreneurship, capitalising on a travelling policy idea to create a market for its provision of "practice"-based teacher education programmes. We show how the IFT has rhetorically constructed its policy window using typical neo-liberal, reformist explanatory frames, allowing them to present themselves as disruptive innovators capable of solving societal challenges. Although apparently sophisticated in presentation and rhetorically adept, we argue that, ultimately, the IFT's rhetoric is instead sophistic, presenting fallacious arguments in plausible ways about complex educational and social problems.