Abdication of the Education State or Just Shifting Responsibilities? The appearance of a new system of reason in constructing educational governance and social exclusion/inclusion in Finland (original) (raw)
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Journal of Education Policy, 2002
Decentralization, goal steering, accountability, managerialism, evaluation, choice, competition and privatization are key terms in the international rhetoric of educational policy. However, in the historical traditions and culturalsocial framework of various nations, this 'new' policy perspective takes a specific form and shape. In the Nordic countries, with their welfare state tradition which stresses equality in education as well as in other fields of life, radical changes are taking place. This article examines the change in educational policy and governance in Finland during the past decade. The examination is based on many sources and materials including documents, statistics and interviews with educational politicians, administrators and teachers, and a survey of students collected during two comparative research projects during 1998^2001.
1999
This publication reviews cross-disciplinary literature on education with the aim of informing the reader of the relation between educational governance and social inclusion/exclusion in policy and research. Various conceptual issues raised in the literature are examined first. Then, two problematics are considered to emphasize how the methods, concepts, and "theories" of social science can produce new ways of thinking, organizing action, and producing results. The section on the equity problematic explores questions of representation and access of individuals and groups to educational and social practices. The section on the problematic of knowledge focuses on the systems of reason whereby identities assigned to actors are "fabricated" in order to organize and divide. It is the authors' hopea to make visible the relation between epistemological assumptions and "real world" practices of research, policy, and schooling. Appendices contain a search of the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC) database for the Education Governance and Social Integration and Exclusion in Europe project, lists from the ERIC alphabetical descriptor display, and short descriptions of findings by ERIC. (Contains 186 references.) (RT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
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European Educational Research Journal, 2015
Since the 1980s, numerous education reforms have sought to dismantle centralised bureaucracies and replace them with devolved systems of schooling that emphasise parental choice and competition between increasingly diversified types of schools. Nevertheless, the Finnish variety of post-comprehensivism continues to emphasise municipal assignment of school places, in the form of the neighbourhood school principle; albeit, in its current form, with the possibility for locally controlled choice and competition, channelled especially through classes with a special emphasis. Based on nine in-depth thematic interviews with experts in provision, management or evaluation of local level compulsory education, this paper focuses on how the conceivable costs and benefits of school choice are recognised and controlled in urban Finnish municipalities. Two distinctive discourses were found to be embodied in the portrayals of the costs and benefits of choice: the legitimization of school choice; and promoting the comprehensive system. The legitimation of school choice discourse is built on the acceptable, but strictly limited reasons for choice, and necessity of school choice. In contrast, the discourse of fostering the comprehensive system is based on the ideology of equality of educational opportunities. It is constructed upon the traditional, universal, non-selective features of the comprehensive school. Against this background, possibilities for school choice can be, and must be, locally controlled-even restricted, if needed-in order to prevent a vicious circle of failing schools in deprived neighbourhoods.