World Yearbook of Education 2020

Schooling, Governance and Inequalities

Julie Allan, Valerie Harwood, Clara Rübner Jørgensen, Julie Allan, Valerie Harwood, Clara Rübner Jørgensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429777523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A timely contribution to the debate on educational governance and equality, the World Yearbook of Education 2020 documents the significant changes that have occurred in the last 20 years reflecting a widespread shift from government to governance. Considering school context as well as specific school responses around the emergence of particular forms of governance, this book presents and contextualises a clear historical account of governance and accountability within schooling.

Organised into three sections covering: Changing contexts of school governance; stakeholders and 'responsibilisation'; and radical governance, carefully chosen contributors provide global insights from around the world. They consider educational outcomes and closing the inequality gap and they document radical forms of governance, at local level, which have sought to create more equitable governance, intelligent accountability and greater involvement of key stakeholders such as students.

Providing a series of provocations and reminders of the possibilities that remain open to us, the World Yearbook of Education 2020 will be of interest to academics, professionals and policymakers in education and school governance, and any scholars who engage in historical studies of education and debates about educational governance and equality.

1 Introduction

Julie Allan, Valerie Harwood and Clara Rübner Jørgensen

In the last 20 years education has seen significant changes in the way in which it is governed, reflecting a widespread shift from government to governance. As a consequence, the state has become ‘less hierarchical, less centralised, less dirigiste in character’ (Jessop, 2000, p. 24). Governance, a ‘popular yet imprecise’ term, (Rhodes, 1996, p. 652) is the mechanism whereby a global assimilation of national educational systems has taken place (Tröhler, 2009), creating a standardisation and world institutionalisation of education (Meyer and Ramirez, 2000). Tröhler (2009) argues that the capacity of this globalised governance to impact educational quality has been limited; the more significant effects have been in the form of heightened inequality.

This volume of the World Yearbook in Education, Schooling, governance and inequalities, will consider specific school contexts of governance as well as school specific responses to governance. It provides a critical analysis of the consequences of the shifts in governance and of the effects of the intensified search for ‘efficiency dividends’ (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010, p. 116) on schools and those within them. It also documents radical forms of governance, at local level, which have sought to create more equitable governance, ‘intelligent accountability’ (O’Neil, 2013, p. 4) and greater involvement of key stakeholders such as students.

Governance has experienced two major waves (Bevir and Rhodes, 2016). The first wave, network governance, can be traced to the dismantling of state bureaucracies through the contracting out of public service delivery and the dispersal of the state through public, private and voluntary organisations. In the second wave, of ‘metagovernance’, governance of government and governance (Daugbjerg and Fawcett, 2015), the state has a new policy role that involves indirect steering of public, private and voluntary stakeholders and controlling them through performance accountability.

The altered geometry of state, society and market is, in some contexts, diminishing the role of public education in ensuring social cohesion and socio-economic development (UNESCO, 2013). Furthermore, increasingly scarce resources are forcing attention, through governance, on quality and on finding more efficient, though not necessarily more effective, forms of evaluation and accountability. A reliance on standardised test scores to determine students’, teachers’ and schools’ performance has been justified on grounds of accountability but has created ‘perverse incentives for schools’ (O’Neill, 2013, p. 16) and generated inequalities for particular groups of students and families (Welner, 2013; Allan and Artiles, 2017; Artiles et al., 2010). The Chief of Staff of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has argued that governance is an important weapon in the battle against inequalities, particularly in education (Hinks, 2017).

Schools have experienced the move ‘from the government of a unitary state to governance in and by networks’ (Bevir and Rhodes, 2003, p. 41) in a myriad of ways. New duties, responsibilities and accountabilities and intensified information production requirements (Darling-Hammond and Adamson, 2010) have repositioned school leaders as technicians of transformation (Ball and Junemann, 2016) with new lines of performance management (Burns and Köster, 2016). Furthermore, the strong incursion into education from the private sector and from philanthropy (Ball and Junemann, 2012) has brought with it new demands. It has also reduced levels of trust between stakeholders within the education system (Cerna, 2014; Burns and Köster, 2016).

The shift from government to governance in education has led to new ways of defining the roles of parents and other stakeholders, who are given more influence over the strategic management of schools through involvement on school governing bodies. The concept of ‘responsibilisation’ (Peeters, 2013) is key to this process, as stakeholders are increasingly required to get involved and take responsibility for social change, often in the context of marketisation and limited resources. Olmedo and Wilkins (2017, p. 585), for example, describe how parents are conceptualised as both ‘morally obligated to take action’ and as ‘vehicles or modalities for the expression and reproduction of market rationalities’. Standardised and centralised systems for holding schools and governors to account, however, maintain the role of the state in shaping school policies and may lead to a prioritisation of skills-based over stakeholder models of governance, as seen recently in England (Wilkins, 2015). The process of involving different stakeholders as governors in education thus raises some important questions about representation, diversity and the ‘governance capital’ of schools (James, 2014). In relation to parent governors, new modes of working in partnership furthermore depend on existing and culturally specific power relationships between parents and school professionals (Heystek, 2006; McNube and Mafore, 2013).

Radical governance can be understood as working against these processes of governance and, given the mechanisms of governance and reach, as always situated within these in one way or another. While it may connect with some of the ideas and ideals of de-schooling (Freire, 1972; Illich, 1970), the focus of radical governance is on issues of governance and governance regimes and this can take a range of forms (and thus is not restricted to de-schooling). As such, radical governance takes issue with the influences of the plethora of governance practices that now impact education, including for instance ‘metagovernance’ (Daugbjerg and Fawcett, 2015) as well as ‘stealth forms of power’ that impact the micro-politics of schooling (Taylor Webb, 2008). In the face of these governance formations, the possibilities for radical forms of governance are not only under ever-increasing pressure; they need also to be flexibly conceived. Accordingly, we put forward the argument that radical processes of governance occur in myriad ways. Radical governance can thus be seen to be inclusive of democratic schools that seek to sit outside of ‘mainstream’ (Fielding, 2014) or the inclusion of students in governance (Brasof, 2015; Carlile, 2012). The latter is one of the ways that radical governance might engage students to challenge hierarchical power structures that preclude them from the governance of schooling. But radical governance can also be engaged with the micro modalities that Lewis (2011) agues are at work in the globalisation of education and the ‘international education industry’ in Aortearoa/New Zealand, or in the micro-politics of parent involvement in schools in Hong Kong (Ng and Yuen, 2015).

Micro modalities of radical governance can operate in the interstices and edges throughout the processes of education and schooling. Take for instance the ways in which teachers and students may work to resist, or enact differently, the ‘governance imperative’. A vivid example of such a different enactment is the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) which has involved systematically altering the power relations between teachers and students (McMahon et al., 2016; Chapter 11). Teague’s (2018) work on the ‘curriculum as a site of counter politics’ is instructive for our discussion since it not only reminds us of the micro-politics (Foucault, 1980) always at play in the interstices of power relations in the curriculum, but also flags the possibilities for counter-politics. Teague draws on Butler (1997) in pointing out that ‘it is in this repeated rearticulation of dominant discourses that the opportunity arises to repeat differently’ (Teague, 2018, p. 104). In this example, we might imagine radical governance to be inclusive of micro and even ‘nano’ forms that allows the work of teachers, as Teague (2018) describes, to ‘repeat differently’.

Part one of the book considers the changing contexts of governance and accountability within school systems and traces the impetus for the shift from government to governance. It examines the new conditions created by such changes and the consequences for key stakeholders in different world contexts. In Chapter 2, Arnold Shober tracks politics, accountability and local control within the United States Education system, asking if equity can survive the ‘epiphany’ of government-centric direction driving up educational achievement that occurred to both the Democrats and the Republicans in the 1990s. Jacqueline Baxter, in Chapter 3, details the consequences, within the UK, of moves towards more networked forms of public sector governance. She reports on a research study of Multi-Academy Trusts, collectives of schools that have come together as a direct consequence of decentralisation, and considers the crucial elements of power, control and communication. Jan Merok Paulsen, in Chapter 4, also examines the shift towards networked governance, but does so in the Nordic context, noting the tendency towards a decoupling of governance forms from the political sphere of local authorities. In Chapter 5, Herbert Altrichter discusses the emergence of evidence-based governance models in the state-based education systems of Austria and Germany. These contexts, hitherto prime examples of state-based and centralist-bureaucratic governance of schooling, have seen a move towards an evidence-based model of governance which has impacted significantly on the work of teachers and schools.

Part two examines changes to everyday practices in schools resulting from new systems of governance. This part focuses particularly on the ‘responsibilisation’ of stakeholders, including teachers and parents, to whom governments are passing on increasing responsibility and control, while at the same time introducing heightened accountability measures. Three out of four chapters in this section focus on the English education setting, which is characterised by high reliance on market-based principles (Ball, 2013) and extensive school diversification (Courtney, 2015) and thus provides a particular context for governance. In Chapter 6, Wilkins discusses changes to school governance in England since the introduction of the Academies Act in 2010, and illustrates the contradictions of this process, which on the one hand has decreased local authority control over schools, but at the same time, increased state-mandated systems of accountability. In Chapter 7, Done discusses a similar tension between the decentralisation and centralisation of educational governance. Focusing on recent inclusion policy and the role of teachers in England, Europe and Australasia (though with most weight on England), she describes responsibilisation and accountability as key elements of governance and analyses them in relation to the German ordoliberal school of neoliberalism. Chapter 8 also touches upon the theme of responsibilisation, but in relation to head teachers and within the context of free schools in England. The chapter presents a conversation between Michael Roden, former principal at the University of Birmingham School, and Julie Allan, a governor of the school and member of the university. The conversation and its commentary provide a unique insight into the challenges of governance in newly established (free) schools, and some of the, at times, competing interests involved. In Chapter 9, Ng and Ko similarly discuss conflicting interests by analysing diverse patterns of micro-politics between head teachers, teachers and parents in Hong Kong over the involvement of parents in school governance. The chapter illustrates the link between governance, power and stakeholder relationships, considering not only the political element, but also the cultural context of parent–teacher dynamics.

Part three explores innovative and radical alternative forms of governance, operating either at a local or community level or by mobilising key stakeholder groups such as students. Radical governance, as we described above, can be understood as occurring in numerous ways but what marks out this practice is the concerted and deliberate efforts that it makes at or towards governance. As such, radical governance might be understood as striving to do the governance of things differently in a number of ways. Chapter 10 offers important insight into a form of radical governance that is set outside of the institutional education (the school). In this chapter Bobongie and Jackson share the work from the Stronger Smarter Institute’s Jarjums programme. Stronger Smarter is an Indigenous-led not-for-profit organisation based in Australia. Jarjums, as they explain, ‘is an Aboriginal word for children used in a number of languages on Australia’s eastern coast’ (Bobongie and Jackson, Chapter 10). The authors describe what they term as ‘a layered approach of radical governance where educators are provided with a different way of thinking and a new set of tools based on Australian Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing’ (Martin, 2008, p. 72). Chapter 11, also from Australia, provides insight on forms of radical governance at the interstices of relationships of power between teachers and students. Addressing the issue of ‘power imbalances between teachers and students’, McMahon, Harwood, Bodkin-Andrews, O’Shea, McKnight, Chandler and Priestly describe biepistemic practice, and explain how this practice is used in AIME with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people. Their discussion is framed by Shawn Wilson’s, an Opaskwayak Cree scholar from northern Manitoba, theorisation of Indigenous relationality (2008). McMahon et al.’s chapter offers a way to learn from Indigenous epistemologies, and shows how biepistemic practice can be a pathway to more egalitarian teacher–student relationships.

Chapter 12, by Teresa Susinos, addresses the question of radical governance in terms of student participation in Spanish schools. In this chapter, ‘Is participation a ‘sick’ word? New insights into student democratic participation in the light of research in Spanish schools’, Susinos takes up an argument made by Portugese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Changing contexts of school governance
• Part II Stakeholders and ‘responsibilisation’
• Part III Radical governance
• Afterword: The magic of democracy
• Index