Comparative Inquiry and Educational Policy Making

David Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781136794643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Building on an increasingly sophisticated body of research on policyborrowing in education, this collection explores ways in which the foreign example in education has been and is being used by policy makers in a variety of settings, its principal aim being to assess the usefulness offoreign experience inhome contexts.

Investigating policy attraction in education

David Phillips^*

University of Oxford, UK

The notion of policy ‘borrowing’ in education has been a consistent theme in comparative inquiry in education from the early decades of the 19th century. Comparativists from the time of Marc-Antoine Jullien (1775–1848) onwards have been concerned with the transferability of ideas from one country to another, while attitudes to the feasibility of educational policy borrowing have ranged from scornful dismissal to enthusiastic advocacy.

Often arguments in favour of borrowing have been seen only as a naïve phase through which comparative education moved in the 19th century. While this may be true in part—there are many examples of the simplistic identification of admired approaches to education that enthusiasts at various times have argued might be imported into a particular home system—it is also the case that borrowing was frequently warned against, either in principle or in the context of particular circumstances. On the one hand it could be argued, for example, that if you took on board educational ideas from Prussia it would have the positive effect of making you more like the Prussians; on the other the complete opposite could be advocated: avoid certain policies and practices or you will end up like the Prussians. At various times over the past two hundred years the German example in education has been used both positively and negatively—it was ‘exemplary both ways’, to use a phrase of Torsten Husén's (1989)—in the policy debate in education. Here, for example, is the inveterate traveller and controversial social commentator Frances Trollope, writing in 1834 and quite undisturbed by Prussian absolutism (she goes on to praise censorship of the press in Prussia):

So deeply are the benevolent and philosophical lawgivers of this enlightened country impressed with the belief that the only sure method of rendering a people pre-eminently great and happy, is to spread the light of true knowledge among them, that the government leaves not the duty of providing instruction for the children of the land to the unthinking caprice of their ignorant parents; but provides for them teachers and books; selected with a degree of vigilant circumspection which would do honour to the affection and judgment of the tenderest father. (Vol. II, p. 169)

Some 10 years later a contrary view of education in Prussia was being put by the Quaker writer William Howitt:

It was true […] that Prussia had hit on a most thorough scheme to convey a certain education to every individual of its population; that that scheme did all that Prussia wanted; but it was not thought necessary to inquire what this scheme really did effect; and whether the scheme itself was consistent with our free constitution, or was practicable with our very different state of opinions and temper in religion, in politics, and the very being of our minds, moulded to a life, activity, and independence, by ages of self-exertion and manly resistance to all despotic attempts of government, to something the very antipodes of German apathy and waxlike pliancy. (Howitt, 1844, p. 302)

(Nearer to our own times and in the context of the debate which led to the 1988 Education Reform Act, incidentally, a British Secretary of State for Education could cite the German experience—inaccurately and in typically cavalier manner—as follows: ‘I don't want to go down the completely regimented German way, because … it took all those years from Bismarck onwards to get it agreed’.)¹

The foreign example has been used, then, both to advocate and to warn against change. In much the same way it can also be employed, as Steiner-Khamsi has pointed out, to ‘glorify’ or to ‘scandalise’ the home situation (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004, pp. 207–208). The US Department of Education's influential report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), for instance, ‘scandalised’ the situation in education in the United States at that time by contrastive references to Japan, Korea, and Germany. And in the light of the first two rounds of results of the OECD's PISA survey the example of Finland is being paraded to throw into contrast (and so to ‘scandalise’) the apparent failings of a number of education systems, in particular that/those of Germany, where the term PISA-Schock has been coined to describe the effects of the PISA findings on that nation's educational psyche.

* * *

There has been much recent work on educational transfer. Schriewer and his colleagues in Berlin have produced a range of studies which investigate the internationalisation of educational ideas within the general concept of world system theory (Schriewer, 2000; Caruso & Tenorth, 2002). Steiner-Khamsi (a contributor to this present collection) has examined policy borrowing from a number of perspectives, using examples from the developing world such as Mongolia and Ghana (Steiner-Khamsi & Quist, 2000; Steiner-Khamsi & Stolpe, 2006). Beech (2005, 2006a, b) and Tanaka (2003) in London, and Ochs (2005), Sprigade (2005), and Rappleye (2006) in Oxford have completed studies which examine aspects of policy transfer in various contexts and periods. Kimberly Ochs and I have developed models and frameworks for the analysis of policy borrowing, using principally the example over a long historical period of British attraction to aspects of education in Germany (Ochs & Phillips, 2002a, b; Phillips, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2000a, b, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006b; Phillips & Ochs, 2003a, b, 2004a, b). Edited collections (among them Phillips, 1989; Finegold et al., 1993; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; Phillips & Ochs, 2004b; Ertl, 2006) have brought together studies of borrowing processes by scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Central to most of these studies are the questions: Can country x solve its educational problems by adopting policy or practice deemed to be successful in country y? And if so, how is such policy or practice transferred and implemented? Direct consensual transfer of policy or practice from one national location to another is relatively rare. But what we might term the ‘foreign example’ in education—what Zymek (1975) has called ‘das Ausland als Argument’ (‘the foreign country as an argument’) and Gonon (1998) ‘das internationale Argument’—is frequently used in the policy debate to inform decision-making, and so the commissioning by politicians of studies of policy and practice in other countries has long been routine. What is worth considering is the extent to which such information is helpful and the use that is made of it. The papers that make up this collection for the Oxford Review of Education are therefore in various ways concerned with the role of the foreign example in education in the process of policy making. They also raise questions about the role and nature of comparative education as a field of academic inquiry.

Robert Cowen's spirited paper starts by raising questions about the role of the consultant within the context of policy advice of a comparative nature. Consultants are said to be people who borrow your watch to tell you the time, and the ‘international expert’ has been described as ‘someone who suffers from the misconception that you can apply the experiences of one country to another and has an unstoppable urge to tell the world about it’.² There are of course examples of educational tourists of all persuasions with pet enthusiasms to sell to any policy makers willing to listen. And a comparative element in reform-related policy discussion and research is now almost de rigueur. As Michele Schweisfurth and I have put it, ‘we are all comparativists now’ (Phillips & Schweisfurth, forthcoming 2007). This can be seen, as Cowen argues, as a ‘banality’ with implicit dangers for comparative education, or we might see it as resulting potentially in a strengthening of comparative inquiry through the active participation of specialists in other fields.

Cowen describes processes of transfer (the Bologna Process, or ‘open education’, for example), translation (‘shape-shifting’), and transformation (involving ‘resistance’) and sees potential in a new ‘intellectual agenda’ on the analysis of policy transfer in education, while regretting that questions of context still need to be addressed in attempts to ‘define the grammars of shape-shifting which occur in the three moments of transfer’ that he identifies. At the same time he reminds us that simple cause and effect relationships (‘straight line’ arguments, as favoured by consultants) are not the domain of the academic comparativist, who sees the world in rather more complex ways. He raises the question of what might constitute ‘applied comparative education’ and thus goes to the heart of the focus of this special issue of ORE, the use and usefulness of the foreign example in policy making.

George Smith and Sonia Exley examine the impact of the foreign example on policy making in England in the 10-year period 1985–1995. They remind us that investigation of foreign practice continued to figure in the work of important 20thcentury inquiries (Robbins, Plowden, Warnock) in much the same way as it had in the great commissions of the 19th century (Cross, Newcastle, Clarendon). They show that the reform agenda was informed by frequent allusion to practice elsewhere—it had become ‘part of the “standard operating procedure” of educational reform’—with the effect for the most part of throwing home policy into sharper contrast. One of the more interesting developments in the period under review was the HMI programme of overseas visits, which resulted in the most developed series of official publications on aspects of education in other countries since Michael Sadler's time as Director of the Board of Education's Office of Special Inquiries and Reports. An analysis of the contents of these reports reveals their closeness to contemporary policy issues under discussion by ministers and their civil servants: the first report, for example, dealt with curriculum and assessment in German schools, at a time when the bill preceding the 1988 Education Reform Act was being drafted and when national provision for the curriculum and testing was being contemplated. Whatever their impact on policy—and Smith and Exley argue that they constituted only ‘small responses’ to international reform impulses led by the OECD—the HMI reports provide insights into the identification of problems and offer useful data on education in a wide variety of countries (especially Germany, the USA and Japan).

Smith and Exley conclude interestingly that the reforms in England in the period under review, far from being directly influenced by foreign examples, served to attract attention from other countries, notably from the United States and in particular in Chubb and Moe's controversial study of 1992, A Lesson in School Reform from Great Britain.

Kimberly Ochs addresses policy issues within the context of one local education authority in England. The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham developed and implemented a remarkable plan to improve teaching in its schools by learning from foreign examples. In particular it sought to emulate good practice in mathematics teaching observed in Swiss schools. A committed and enthusiastic chief education officer employed stratagems that ensured the co-operation of schools and resulted in the training of staff in new teaching techniques, backed by explanatory handbooks. This has resulted in a rare example of the successful introduction of practice observed elsewhere into a home system. The effect in Barking and Dagenham has been considerable improvement in the measured mathematical ability of primary school pupils.

Hubert Ertl's paper examines the current policy debate in Germany, following the country's notably poor results in the OECD's PISA survey of 2000 and its only average performance in the 2003 study. Here is an example par excellence of the impact of comparative data on policy making. Germany's disappointing performance in PISA has been used to ‘scandalise’ educational provision and has led to much policy soulsearching. As Ertl argues, reform is now inevitable, and foreign comparisons are being taken more seriously than in the past. In particular now accepted concepts of school autonomy, national standards, and regular assessment of schools (both internal and external) have parallels in other systems that have been studied. Evaluation in all its forms has now become big business in Germany.

The European Union has encouraged a wide range of educational interaction both among member states and with ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Investigating policy attraction in education
• 2. Acting comparatively upon the educational world: puzzles and possibilities
• 3. The influence of overseas examples on DES policy-making for the school system in England, 1985–1995
• 4. Cross-national policy borrowing and educational innovation: improving achievement in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
• 5. Educational standards and the changing discourse on education: the reception and consequences of the PISA study in Germany
• 6. Comparative research as an instrument for EU aid and development programmes
• 7. Assumptions and implications of cross-national attraction in education: the case of ‘learning from Japan’
• 8. The economics of policy borrowing and lending: a study of late adopters
• 9. Comparing the trajectories of educational change and policy transfer in developing countries
• 10. Global and cross-national influences on education in post-genocide Rwanda
• Index