Policy Transfer and Educational Change

David Scott, Mayumi Terano, Roger Slee, Chris Husbands, Raphael Wilkins

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473958982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation comparative

Improving education through policy learning is an important notion for countries in need of educational reform. However, identifying a successful set of practices and transferring them from one national setting to another is a complex exercise. Drawing from their extensive experience, the authors explore a single case study of policy transfer in India, demonstrating how and under what conditions educational reforms can be put into practice successfully and sustainably.

Coverage includes:

·Policy Learning

·Inclusive Practices

·School Autonomy and School Leadership

·India and its system of education

This book offers a unique, international perspective on educational reform and is a useful resource for teachers, policy makers and postgraduate level students.

1 Introduction

Since the development of human capital theory with its ambitious and far-reaching claims to have identified a significant correlation between education and economic achievement, we have witnessed an unprecedented bevy of educational reforms, particularly in the developing world. These reforms have largely concentrated on curricular and workforce changes using evaluation processes and techniques, supposedly premised on national and international research findings. To the extent that the mechanisms responsible for implementing these innovations and changes are referred to, it is assumed that their success depends on a well-ordered and functioning educational administration free from interference. Superficially this has meant, firstly, paying lip service to the mantra that business models of management provide sufficient leverage to override ‘outside interference’, and secondly, it has been predicated on the unarticulated belief that national administrations are both efficient and neutral. However, this model has never operated in practice and the reforms both good and bad have rarely been successfully implemented.

This book examines the reasons for India’s failure to bring these generally excellent proposals for reform and improvement to fruition. On the one hand, India has been particularly open to the suggestions and urgings of international organisations as to how to improve its educational performance. Yet, on the other, its system of administration vital to the possible success of implementing these reforms is closed and driven by internal conflict that has continuously paralysed all hope of delivery and effectively cancelled out changes initiated at the top level or originating from official international consultancies in which researchers from all over the world have often played an important role.

Obviously, these sometimes bewildering changes and processes have not enjoyed a good reception. Indian teachers and particularly those who have been in service over this entire period of frequent and hectic reform and who are on the receiving end of these initiatives, when asked what they think of them, interestingly comment much less on the actual content of the reforms, than on processes and their outcomes. A frequently expressed view is ‘the more it all changes, the more it stays the same’. Questions we need to ask are why, and hence how, do costly reforms fail in India, and what lessons for other countries can be drawn from an analysis of those experiences? What can our understanding of the reasons for the continual failure of reforms tell us about how to make them more effective? In other words, how can one rescue the core elements of useful reforms to make them reach, and work better at, the level of the school? These are the questions we will try to answer in this book.

It should be apparent that, to a large extent, we are referring to the failure to implement policy. Generally speaking the failure to implement a policy is often attributed to four major factors: the design of the policy itself is flawed (it is not coherent, well-directed and practical and does not mesh with others operating in the same field); the policy is politically and/or socially unacceptable; insufficient attention is paid to the process of communicating and delivering the policy; and there are inadequate conditions in the classroom and for the preparation of teachers in the implementation of the policy.

In order to address these impediments or failures to successful implementation it is necessary to address four facets or dimensions of the problem. The first of these is the structure of any new programme, i.e. its comprehensiveness, coherence and relevance. The new programme is composed of a set of elements arranged in a logically coherent way, i.e. arrangements of resources, functions and roles for stakeholders, and vertical and horizontal relationships between these allocations of resources, functions and roles. The programme has a causal narrative, that is, the productive practice, the focus of the reform, is such that a leads to b; or the implementation of a in ideal circumstances leads to b₁, b₂, b₃ and so on. And the programme has a comprehensive and appropriate rationale (ethical, practical and consequential) and a realistic implementation plan. For example, in relation to pre-service and in-service teacher training curricula, it is important to develop a comprehensive set of curriculum standards and learning outcomes, syllabus content that extends from subject knowledge to developmental processes, a coherent structure of pedagogic standards or teaching and learning arrangements, and a strategy for involving educational reformers, policy developers and jurisdictional authorities in the process from the outset.

The second facet or dimension refers to the sites of implementation, how they are constructed and how they functioned prior to the new reform. The third dimension refers to how the current implementation site would need to be changed to accommodate the new initiative, and the fourth refers to issues of institutional structure, form and capacity at these sites. It is in the last of these – the institutional capacity – that we come across an issue that is rarely discussed in the relevant literature. In the literature on school improvement there are many examples of initiatives that flourished while support was being provided by an external agency or research team, but that withered when the external support ended, practice reverting to the status quo ante. Creating change in organisations is a complicated business, given that an organisational culture often exerts controls and deters change. By institutionalisation we mean the degree to which the central activities, aptitudes and attitudes of the intervention become embedded in the structures and culture of the school, pervading the thinking and actions of teachers, administrators and students. Institutionalisation of the intervention is not guaranteed; the literature on organisational development and school reform suggests that there is a wide range of conditions in schools that can positively or negatively impact on the take-up, spread and depth of any reform, and that these conditions interact with one another and with reform efforts in complex, interactive ways.

Administrative Inertia

Writers who deal with institutional incapacity, and international and national policy-makers, refer to staff training and administrative reorganisation as if they are dealing exclusively with a technical problem that can easily be resolved by making the administration more responsive. Undeniably administration inertia is a problem because, by nature, administrations are resistant to change. To a certain extent, the modus operandi is to treat policy initiatives as occupational hazards to be neutralised as quickly and effectively as possible. However, the problem is more complex because administrations do not function in a void. They are predicated on social systems and processes that contextualise their work, including specific sets of epistemological perspectives, and these same systems, knowledge sets and processes are influential at every stage of implementation. This means that the administration is a reflection and a projection of the social order and must be understood as such.

What this means is that the comparative unresponsiveness of the bureaucracy to policy-making in developing countries is especially marked due, in part, to the relatively recent development of public systems of administration and the relatively late development of educational systems and their consolidation of the apparatus to implement policy. It may well be the case that the staff is insufficiently trained and administrative procedures and regulations are weak. In this sense we can talk about insufficient institutionalisation because the organisation cannot count on adequate human resources and administrative coherence. But institutionalisation goes beyond these aspects that are readily susceptible of technical resolution, that is, more training and bureaucratic reorganisation. Institutionalisation includes the degree to which the organisation manages to communicate its purpose and identity to its staff and its identity is more often than not distorted by the needs and actions of interest groups. The staff, in turn, respond to the incentives and sanctions that the institution operates in order to achieve its purposes. This is an important theme but it is only one aspect of a more general problem.

The crux of the matter is that the administrations of most developing countries are markedly different from the administrations of more developed countries with their strong historically entrenched independent identities. The state apparatus in emerging political entities is likely to be under the control of the political groups or coalitions of interest currently exercising power and is often a site of both conflict and compromise amongst them. Its primary function is one of attenuation or control of the conflicts, the search for compromise and the control of the population as a whole. Under these circumstances the obstacles to an independent identity to carry out its designated purpose – education in our case – is severely circumscribed by what we can call power politics. This is especially true in India, where political stability has been achieved through corporate integration of all the major sectors and strata of the society. It has not been achieved by direct political control as in authoritarian states; neither have the counterbalances from plural democracies kept a watchful eye on the bureaucracy’s accomplishment of its designated purposes. Indian corporative politics puts general loyalty to groups and individuals over and above the specific purposes of the organisations in which they operate.

Bureaucracies then, are also sites where political leaders and groups can provide positions for their supporters. To put it another way, the primary purpose of the educational administration is not to develop and/or implement educational policies, but to position leaders and groups using appropriate mechanisms to do so. In this sense the problem of reform implementation is not one of incapacity or disorganisation or of a lack of institutionalisation but an inability to focus on the prime concerns of an education system. Once we recognise that a significant part of the failure of policy to reach the schools successfully intact is the very modus vivendi of the administration itself, then it is equally clear that solutions will be difficult to find. Any attempt to instil the improvements contemplated within policies would involve challenging established institutional behaviours. This in turn would depend on the corporative distribution of personal and group loyalties changing, something we unfortunately and frustratingly are unlikely to see in the near future.

In this book we are interested in all aspects of policy implementation: pedagogical, organisational, resourcing and political–institutional. Critical accounts of policy developments and policy implementations in India will be used to demonstrate that we take particularly seriously the hitherto neglected category of institutional and political infrastructure. But at every point our examination of the non-educational (political) aspects of the bureaucracy will point to the desired educational outcomes and the failure or success of bringing these about.

Education Policy

It is important to start with a framework for educational implementation, a check list of necessary elements and steps that condition and contextualise the processes of implementation. More recent education policy researchers, such as Stephen Ball (1994), depict curriculum reform and policy-making as a ‘messy’, complex and contested enterprise. As has been frequently observed (for example, Whitty, 2002), policy is an object of contest and struggle between competing ideologies, education visions, personal interests and political or organisational positions. All of these forces come together in an incubator of international, national and local contexts. For Ball, understanding education reforms requires us to interrogate policy cycles, policy discourses, policy actors, policy arenas and contexts. His is a nuanced and more realistic approach to analysing education reform developed over years through a series of empirical analyses of policy sites, discourses and contexts. Policy is produced through a series of struggles involving many actors and agencies. In addition, local policy cannot be understood without reference to the global impact of transnational agencies such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Bank, not for profit and for profit organisations, and so forth.

Change to an education system and its curriculum is always a change to the status quo, to what already exists. Therefore in trying to understand how national education systems and their curricula change, it is important to understand how those systems and curricula are currently structured. What this means is that the same programme of reform delivered in different countries is likely to have different effects on the different elements of the system and will have different histories within the system. It is possible to categorise reform effect and history in five ways: point of entry into the system and direction of flow, sustainability of the integrity of the reform, intensity of the reform or capacity to effect change, malleability of the system or capacity to change, and institutionalisation processes.

With regards to the first of these – point of entry and direction of flow – there are a number of possible scenarios. There are different points of entry: at the top of the system where this is understood either as the progenitor of policy or as the apex of a power structure however diffuse it is or becomes; at the bottom of the system so that the point of entry is not at the political, policy-making, bureaucratic or official level but at the level of teacher and classroom; or at a variety of entry points in the system. Broadly, three models depicting direction of flow can be identified: a centrally controlled policy process where the direction is uni-directional and downward oriented; a pluralist model where the direction of flow is still uni-directional, but the developmental movement is to all parts of the system and the orientation is pluralist; and a fragmented and multi-directional model where new policy (which represents the reform) is always in a state of flux as policy texts are received and interpreted at different points in the system and the process is understood as fragmented, non-linear, contested and as a place where original intentions are rarely fulfilled in practice. In other words, without a consistent flow that is distributed throughout the system, there will always be an element of risk involved that the reform will result in unintended outcomes.

The second of these elements is the sustainability of the integrity of the reform over time. What we mean by this is the capacity of the reform to retain its original shape, form and content as it is disseminated through the system. A reform is embedded in what already exists. Most obviously the reform itself as it was originally conceived (in its pure and ideal state) undergoes processes of amendment, modification, correction and revision, and it does this at different points in the process. These different points can be described as: exploration and development, recontextualisation, implementation, re-implementation and institutionalisation. When we refer to the integrity of a reform, this should not be understood in any ideal or absolute sense. A reform or an intervention in a system is always an amalgam of different ideas and prescriptions that is never completely coherent. What can be suggested, however, is that in the long process of formulation of the reform to application, to implementation, and thence to institutionalisation, the original integrity of the reform is either strongly or weakly maintained.

The third feature is the intensity of the reform (or intervention) and its capacity to effect change. This refers to the structure of the reform or the way it is constituted. Some reforms are focused on relations within the system that are likely to have a minimal impact on the system as a whole; others aim to influence the whole workings of the system. Examples of the former include labour market reforms, which though they usually come within a package of other reforms, are designed to impact on one part of the system and not the whole. On the other hand, reforms, for example, which focus on the curriculum and the way it is delivered, as in the 1988 Education Reform Act in the United Kingdom, which changed the whole tenor and orientation of education in that country, can be thought of as whole system reforms or interventions. Furthermore, some of these reforms are crafted so that, even given the state of the system into which they are being introduced, they have a more fundamental impact than other reforms. This in turn points to the degree of resilience of the system or capacity to resist a reform. And, indeed, any educational system has a limited capacity to resist being reformed, not least because those elements that allow it to resist may be the objective of the reform; systems therefore have a greater or lesser capacity to resist reforms. Equally, a reform itself has a greater or lesser capacity to impact on and change the structures and environments into which it is being introduced, and in part this refers to not only how it is going to be introduced, but also to the structures and constitution of the reform package itself. Its penetrative power (though this may not be realised) or capacity to effect change is different with different reforms. This is the intensity of the reform or intervention, and clearly its obverse is the resilience or otherwise of the current arrangements within the system. This is the malleability of that system.

Beyond this, there are institutionalising elements in the system, two of which are particularly important. The first of these is the longevity and sustainability of resource arrangements, allocations of particular people to positions of responsibility, particular roles and arrangements of power and authority, and the capacity of key people in the system, new policy discourses, new policies and new priorities. The second element is the capacity to adapt to changes to these new policy discourses, policies and priorities. An example of an institutionalised mechanism set up to allow this to happen is a formal curriculum review at a set point in time, though most educational processes of review, development and implementation round the world are conducted on an ad hoc basis; when, where and how are decided by political imperatives.

Education Reforms

Insight into problems faced by an educational system and awareness of potential solutions do not necessarily lead to the ability to act in an effective manner in order to guide stakeholders in instituting change. The rapid and successful implementation of education reforms in a school system is directly dependent on the quality of the knowledge, skills and thinking that an education system and those that introduce its planned reforms bring to the reform process. Moreover, innovations and reforms call for new and often substantially improved, knowledge, skills and thinking in several domains. This includes knowledge about obstacles to change at both the instrumental and affective levels and about the change process itself.

John Kotter (2012) suggests eight steps that characterise effective change: establishing a legitimate sense of urgency; creating a guiding coalition with enough power and knowledge to lead the change; developing a strategy and a vision; communicating the change vision; empowering broad-based action; generating short-term wins and celebrating them; consolidating gains and producing more change; and anchoring these new approaches in the work culture. Kotter warns that it is particularly in the later stages of a change process when progress is being made toward achieving goals that change is likely to fail because people are then often tired and feel enough has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 India and its system of education
• 3 The spread of ideas
• 4 Teachers as professional learners
• 5 School autonomy and school leadership
• 6 Inclusive practices
• 7 Policy learning
• References
• Author Index
• Index