Established and emerging actors in the national political arenas (original) (raw)

Politics of Quality in Education

The question of quality has become one of the most important framing factors in education and has been of growing interest to international organisations and national policymakers for decades. Politics of Quality in Education focuses on Brazil, China, and Russia, part of the so-called emerging nations' BRICS block, and draws on a four-year project to develop a new theoretical and methodological approach.

Dynamics in Education Politics

Dynamics in Education Politics

Dynamics in Education Politics: Understanding and Explaining the Finnish Case intro duces a new theoretical framework characterised as Comparative Analytics of Dynamics in Education Politics (CADEP). Albeit the topicality of comparative research is obvious in the current era of global large-scale assessment, with its concomitant media visibility and political effects, comparative education is still suffering from certain methodological deficits and is in need of robust theo risation. Focusing on relational dynamics between policy threads, actors and institutions in education politics CADEP seriously considers the phenomena of complexity, contingency and trans-nationality in late-modern societies. In this book CADEP is applied and validated in analysing the "Finnish Edu cational Miracle" that has been attracting attention in the educational world ever since they rocketed to fame following the PISA studies during the 2000s. This book will open up opportunities for mutual understanding and learn ing rather than just celebrating the exceptional circumstances or sustainable leadership.

3. The Governance of Education Systems

Open Book Publishers, 2023

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: About the Authors Montserrat Gomendio, a biologist by training, holds a BSc from Universidad Complutense (Madrid), a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (UK), and is currently a tenured Research Professor at the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). For many years, she combined her research work with leadership positions such as Director of the Spanish National Science Museum and Vice-President of the Spanish Research Council. In 2011 she was appointed Secretary of State for Education, Vocational Training and Universities in the Spanish Government. In 2015 she joined the OECD as Deputy Director of Education and in 2017 she became Head of the OECD Skills Centre. Since 2020 she has co-founded and co-chaired Skills WeGo, a consultancy on education, training and employment. Montserrat is a member of the Board of the International Baccalaureate. She has authored books and over 100 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. José Ignacio Wert holds a law degree from Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and a master's degree in Political Sociology by Instituto de Estudios Políticos (Spain). He has been Deputy Director of the Centre for Sociological Research (a public research institution) and founder and CEO of Demoscopia, a leading polling firm in Spain, as well as serving in different managing capacities in other private ventures. From 2011 to 2015 he was Minister of Education, Culture and Sport in the Spanish Government and from 2015 to 2018 he was Spain's Ambassador to the OECD. Since 2020 he has co-founded and co-chaired Skills WeGo, a consultancy on education, training and employment. He is the author of four books and co-author of over two dozen others, plus several hundred articles in journals and magazines. xvii Preface by putting pressure on governments to decrease class size over time and by rejecting attempts to improve teacher quality and evaluate teachers or students. Thus, the trade-off has been exactly the opposite. When we analyse the trends of countries positioned somewhere between these opposite poles (Europe, United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand), we find that most of them have not managed to improve their education systems during the last decades, despite major increases in levels of investment and many reforms. This clearly shows that the evidence provided by international surveys has not had the expected impact on the performance of education systems. We argue that this is partly because some policy recommendations are misleading, and partly because in certain political contexts solid evidence is not enough to overcome huge political costs, which tend to be the result of ideological battles and/or strong underlying conflicts of interest. Despite this pessimistic conclusion, we remain convinced that the only way forward is to obtain robust evidence and, more importantly, to improve the policy recommendations so that they adapt more readily to the specific context experienced by each country. In countries where the magnitude of the political costs and underlying conflicts of interest are too great, the only way forward may be to start pilot projects rather than to implement systemic changes. If successful, such pilots may be expanded, but small steps like this will require time, and students may not have much time to spare since they need to face an uncertain, challenging and rapidly changing world. 2 'Opinions, attitudes and values'-following the metaphor coined by Sir Robert Worcester, are different expressions of depth and intensity for views that people may have on any given matter: "opinions: the ripples on the surface of the public's consciousness, shallow, and easily changed; attitudes: the currents below the surface, deeper and stronger; and values: the deep tides of public mood, slow to change, but powerful" (Worcester, 1983).

New scalar politics: Implications for education policy

This paper argues that globalisation has implications for research and theory in the social sciences, demanding that the social no longer be seen as homologous with nation, but also linked to postnational or global fields. This situation has theoretical and methodological implications for comparative education specifically focused on education policy, which traditionally has taken the nationstate as the unit of analysis, and also worked with 'methodological nationalism'. The paper argues that globalisation has witnessed a rescaling of educational politics and policymaking and relocated some political authority to an emergent global education policy field, with implications for the functioning of national political authority and national education policy fields. This rescaling and this reworking of political authority are illustrated through two cases: the first is concerned with the impact of a globalised policy discourse of the 'knowledge economy' proselytised by the OECD and its impact in Australian policy developments; the second is concerned explicitly with the constitution of a global education policy field as a commensurate space of equivalence, as evidenced in the OECD's PISA and educational indicators work and their increasing global coverage. The paper indicatively utilises Bourdieu's 'thinking tools' to understand the emergent global education policy field and suggests these are very useful for doing comparative education policy analysis.

POLICY ASSEMBLAGE IN EDUCATION (PhD Thesis)

Evidence based policy making (EBP) has become the dominant practice in education policy globally. How do certain policy ideas and practices become pervasive? How is knowledge produced, validated and rendered authoritative? What are the institutional practices and routines through which ‘policy doings’ occur? How do policy actors gain the capacity to act? These are some of the questions this thesis attempts to answer. In this study, I explore how EBP is assembled, promoted and stabilised. I follow closely the practices by which evidence is ‘gathered’: how entities are rendered calculable and the means by which calculation is effected. Drawing upon the theoretical and conceptual resources of material semiotics, I examine two performances of EBP: the OECD’s well known survey, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in which education systems are evaluated and compared; and a national school reform effort, Australia’s Education Revolution, where EBP is employed to standardise, centralise and organise the system. Using documentary evidence and interviews with 18 policy actors, I analyse EBP’s ordering practices and the practical politics by which it is performed. EBP seeks to close off debates and settle understandings by seeking ‘what works’ and identifying ‘best practice’. It seeks to trump uncertain politics with certain science. Its politics lies in creating a divide between an apparently neutral and apolitical ‘science’ on the one hand and an uncertain, prejudiced ‘politics’ on the other, so that employing reliable and good science can be presented as an antidote to untrustworthy politics. Rather than seeing science as politics by other means, as Latour suggests, EBP proposes that politics is science by other means. In this study, I demonstrate how this division between science and politics is achieved in EBP. Closing off spaces for debate prematurely through ‘scientific evidence’ comes at the high cost of diminished understanding and unwarranted certainty. In short, the clarities sought in EBP can be blinding rather than illuminating. Through this detailed empirical study, I show that EBP is a techno-political assemblage. Following my ethical impulse, I reintroduce politics into the apparently purely technical and turn ‘matters of fact’ into ‘matters of concern’. This opens up new spaces for intervention, new ‘assemblies’ where debate and openness and a desire to do ‘good’ are admissible. It is my hope that this thesis will encourage a shift to more creative and more considered ways of ‘doing’ EBP.