Edu.net

Globalisation and Education Policy Mobility

Stephen J. Ball, Carolina Junemann, Diego Santori

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317247852
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Didattica generale

Edu.net builds upon, and extends, a series of research studies of education policy networks and global policy mobilities. It draws on comprehensive data resulting from a Leverhulme Trust research study focused on Africa, and a study funded by the British Academy focused on India, which explored the way in which global actors and organisations bring policy ideas to bear and are joined up in a global education policy network.

This timely and cutting-edge new work develops concepts, analyses and methods deployed in Education Plc (2008), Networks, New Governance and Education (2012) and Global Education Inc. (2012). The research is framed by an elaboration of Network Ethnography, an innovative method of policy research.

Edu.net presents the substantive findings of the authors' research by focusing on various kinds of policy movement – people, ideas, practices, methods, money. The book is about both global education policy and ways of researching policy in a global setting. It is an essential read for policy analysts, educational academic researchers and postgraduate education students alike.

1
NETWORKS, GLOBALISATION AND POLICY MOBILITY¹

In this book, we are attempting to do two things – together. On the one hand, following from previous work (Ball 2007a, 2007b, 2012; Ball and Junemann 2012), we will map, explore and analyse the structure, dynamics and evolution of a global education policy community. Rhodes (2006) identifies the main characteristics of a policy community: as ‘a limited number of participants with some groups consciously excluded; frequent and high-quality interaction between all members of the community on all matters related to the policy issues; consistency in values, membership, and policy outcomes …’ (p. 428). That is, in this case, a set of organisations, people and events that are joined up in different ways, in relation to a global project of education reform. This project is in general terms embroiled in and bringing about the neoliberalisation of education – a steady flow of moves and changes, a process of attrition and colonisation that is changing the global topography of education. The neoliberal project is ‘a story of the never-inevitable ascendancy of neoliberalization, as an open-ended and contradictory process of politically assisted market rule’ (Peck 2010: xii). However, our focus is not on abstract neoliberalism (noun), but neoliberalisation (verb, i.e. the process of change). We agree with Peck’s (2010: 9) argument that processual examinations of neoliberalisation are now more important than static and taxonomic renderings of neoliberalism, and the methodological challenge of uncovering neoliberalism in its various moments of actualisation, failure, normalisation and adaptation is a geographical problem (Peck 2010: 33). It requires, as Peck (2010: 33–4) puts it, ‘determining the relational location of specific events, actors, and claims on the broader terrain of socioregulatory restructuring’. Neoliberalisation is both a disarticulation and re-articulation of governance, the state, education policy and the delivery of educational services. In other words, what is involved here is not simply changes in policy or systems and structures, but more basically changes in political rationality and concomitantly in modalities of governing. Thinking about global governance means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. However, as will become apparent later, there is no simple conflation here of neoliberalism with traditional politics or political parties. In the examples we quote and the cases we examine, the journeys made by policies ‘and the institutional footprints they have left behind, have often crossed partisan and ideological lines, recruiting a heterodox band of supporters, promoters, and interlocutors’ (Peck and Theodore 2015: xviii).

Neoliberalisation is evident in the reworking of state systems of education and state education policies, as a part of what Pasi Sahlberg calls GERM – the Global Education Reform Movement. He argues that since the 1980s, a set of basic policy technologies have increasingly become adopted as an orthodoxy of educational reform. He goes on to point out that GERM is often promoted through the interests of international development agencies and private enterprises through their interventions in national education reforms and formulation and dissemination of ‘good practice’. We will explore some of these interventions and practices. Sahlberg identities five globally common features of GERM (see below)² that are employed as strategies to ‘improve’ the quality of education and address the ‘wicked’ problems embedded in public education systems. The identification and naming of these ‘problems’ is a key facet of the ‘work’ of GERM. The definition of policy problems frames the possibilities of solution. The five highly interrelated features are:

1. The standardisation of education. This involves both a focus on outcomes (i.e. student learning and school performance) and centrally prescribed curricula.

Consequently, a widely accepted – and generally unquestioned – belief among policymakers and education reformers is that setting clear and sufficiently high performance standards for schools, teachers and students will necessarily improve the quality of expected outcomes. Enforcement of external testing and evaluation systems to assess how well these standards have been attained emerged originally from standards-oriented education policies.

The result is a homogenisation of education policies worldwide, based upon standardised solutions offered at increasingly lower cost for those desiring to improve school quality and effectiveness.

2. A focus on core subjects in school, in other words on literacy, numeracy and science. International student assessment surveys, such as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS, are used as criteria of good educational performance, in which reading, mathematical and scientific literacy are used as the key indicators of the success or failure of pupils, teachers, schools and entire education systems, at the expense of other subjects.

3. The search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals. ‘This minimizes experimentation, reduces use of alternative pedagogical approaches, and limits risk-taking in schools and classrooms’.³ Paradoxically, pedagogical innovation is sought and celebrated (e.g. STIReducation and Centre for Education Innovations) alongside cheap and easy standardised classroom and organisational practices (e.g. Bridge International Academies, Pearson Education).

4. The use of corporate management models (and particularly performance management) as a main driver of organisational improvement. Organisational practices are ‘lent by’ and borrowed from business, making educational institutions more businesslike and more like businesses, with a concomitant emphasis on productivity and performance rather than moral goals of human development.

5. Test-based accountability policies for schools. That is, the tying of school performance – especially raising student achievement – to processes of accrediting, promoting, inspecting and, ultimately, rewarding or disciplining schools and teachers. One consequence of this is that teachers devote increased attention to limited aspects of schooling, such as student achievement in mathematical and reading literacy and exit examination results, and pedagogy is reduced to ‘teaching to the test’.

In relation to all of this, education systems around the world are subject to reform, unendingly it seems. In the past 20 years, education, like many other areas of social policy, has become subject to ‘policy overload’, or what Dunleavy and O’Leary (1987) call ‘hyperactivism’. The ‘depth, breadth and pace of change’ and ‘level of government activity’ in education has been ‘unprecedented’ (Coffield 2006: 2). In relation to this, policy is becoming ‘faster’ (Peck and Theodore 2015). In part, this activism and speed is tactical. It is about the new dynamism of government, about being seen to be doing something, tackling problems, ‘transforming’ systems. Within the complex and expansive political rhetoric of education reform, the ideas of transformation, modernisation, innovation, enterprise, creativity and competitiveness are key signifiers of government seriousness and activity. They often appear in texts as co-occurrences, that is, they are linked together as a discursive ensemble and signify the sense of the pace, movement and constant change that is taken to be required by the demands of globalisation, and of the needs of a globalised economy. These qualities are set over and against the supposed inadequacies, particularly the slowness and unresponsiveness and risk aversion of the public sector prior to reform. The shift from the latter to the former is taken to be necessary and inevitable, and related primarily to economic rather than social pressures and needs, as a response to the urgent demands of globalisation and international competitiveness. This is a key part of the ‘necessarian logic of … political economy’, as Watson and Hay (2003: 295) call it. ‘Traveling policy, like globalization, is nothing new, nevertheless, it has been accelerating in recent decades to such an extent that it is now ubiquitous, almost mundane’ (Kingfisher 2013: 11). However, as we will show, as far as we are able with our cases and data, this urgency of reform is not the same everywhere. The pace of policy varies from place to place, between and within countries.

We will examine the processes of neoliberalisation through cases – looking at particular places and people, and ‘mobility events’ and things (or forms) – that is, the materialities and practices of change, technology in particular. As noted, we also attempt to be attentive to the variations between places. We do not assume that neoliberalism is the same everywhere. Rather, it mutates and adapts to local histories and politico-cultural traditions. Changes are mediated, translated and accommodated in, and to the local, neoliberalism is, in part at least, what actors make of it, and as Clarke (2012a: 27) argues: ‘neoliberalization processes as simultaneously patterned and interconnected but also locally specific, path dependent, contested, unstable’. Our concern, then, is with some instances of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002). Peck and Theodore (2010) suggest the term ‘policy mobility’ to describe the movement of policies – not in distinct and compact forms or ‘bundles’, but rather in a piecemeal fashion, which are then (re)assembled in particular ways, in particular places and for particular purposes (McCann and Ward 2012). That is, ‘the complex folding of policy lessons derived from one place into reformed and transformed arrangements elsewhere’ (Peck and Theodore 2015: xvii). We pay somewhat less attention to context of context, that is, the ‘institutional and ideological conditions that variously enable, envelope, and energize [the] purposeful mobilization’ of neoliberal policies (Peck 2011: 793), although in Chapter 3 in particular we do attend to some of the ways in which the context of context is constructed. Policies are mobile both in distinct and compact forms or ‘bundles’ and also in a piecemeal fashion. These bundles and singulars are (re)assembled in somewhat diverse ways, in particular places and for particular purposes (McCann and Ward 2012). We also suggest, at least in relation to education policy, and in the relation between education and other policies, that these reassemblies may have convergent consequences in terms of modes of governance and global forms and conceptions of policy that require us to think both about how the ‘global’ impacts on the ‘national’, while acknowledging, at the same time, the extent to which the national is critical in the formation of global policy agendas.

We will grapple with, or counterpoint if you like, the tension-filled relationships between territorial fixity and place specificity, on the one hand, and global flows, relations and interconnections, on the other. Nonetheless, as we shall suggest, certainly in the field of education, the bits and pieces of education reform, the elements of GERM, when put together, constitute a coherent and effective political dispositif. That is, an endless variety of elements that constitute a particular historical moment, and organise and structure human actions in relation to a particular social experience. Bailey (2015) argues that:

by conceiving of policy in terms of dispositif, it is possible to understand and situate the new dynamics and mechanisms of policy within the context of broader social, political and economic forces, at the same time as attending to local ‘materialisations’ and enactments (including, for example, contestation, integration, inflection and ‘rejection’). The heterogeneous array of organisations and practices which fall under the broad rubric of this dispositif each contribute to, reflect and enable the semiotic and technical re-articulation of education and educational governance.

Some of the parts of this dispositif ‘work’ in some places and others do not, and despite the celebration of the ‘successes’ of reform, neoliberalisation ‘does not follow the pristine path of rolling market liberalization and competitive convergence; it is one of repeated prosaic and often botched efforts to fix markets, to build quasimarkets, and to repair market failures’ (Peck 2010: xiii). We are not making crude assertions of convergence here, although convergence is relative – there clearly is some degree of convergence between the cases and places we look at. The problem is to understand convergence and glocalisation together, and diffusion, and mobility and mutation at the same time. In all of this, there is no absolute change, but rather a shift in the mix of policy players and a reconfiguration of their roles and relationships, the emergence of new sites and spaces of policy, and new developing synergies between policy and business imaginaries.

On the other hand, this is a book about method. We set out to develop a research sensibility and a set of techniques that are appropriate to the study of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and policy mobilities. Again, developing from previous work, we outline and illustrate what we call the method of ‘network ethnography’. As McCann and Temenos (2015: 19) argue, the:

policy mobilities literature would benefit from engagement with geographic studies of networks … since exploring the pathways through which policy mobility occurs can help to elucidate the various interconnections among people, policy and places that make policy-making a social and political practice.⁴

So our cases provide opportunities to examine the ways in which policy moves through network relations and network activities, and at the same time we seek to ‘try out’ and lay out a set of research strategies and tactics that other researchers might take up and develop further. These are in part inspired by Marcus’s notion of multisite ethnography and his concept of following, and its take-up by geographers (McCann, Cook and Ward in particular). Again, as McCann and Temenos (2015: 17) explain, the focus on policy mobilities:

directs researchers toward literally and figuratively following policies and policy actors through particular sites and situations of knowledge production and political struggle/legitim...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Networks, globalisation and policy mobility
• 2 Network ethnography and ‘following policy’
• 3 Following people, the life, the biography
• 4 Following things: the mobilisation of global forms
• 5 Following money
• 6 Following the plot, the story, the narrative
• 7 Following reform
• Appendix: List of interviews and research visits
• References
• Index