International Educational Governance: Volume 12

In October 2008, a group of international scholars met at Hohentuebingen Castle, in Tuebingen, Germany, to discuss issues of international governance in education. At that time, governance as an analytical concept was just beginning to be more widely discussed in German educational science. These discussions were primarily in the context of new forms of organizational steering and with regards to a changing embeddedness of national education systems attributed to processes of globalization and fiscal austerity. In addition, a large interdisciplinary research project located at the University of Bremen, TranState, was already exerting considerable international influence with a decidedly comparative perspective on those areas of German educational science. However, in this early phase, the debate on international governance in education was limited and focused heavily on emerging theories of governance, among colleagues at the University of Tuebingen, both at the Institute of Education as well as in other parts of the faculty. To me, Frank-Olaf Radtke was the key person who had first drawn my attention to educational governance, and I was especially grateful for having had the opportunity to continue our previous exchanges in the context of the Tuebingen meeting.

This chapter addresses international educational governance by exploring some of the factors contributing to increasingly internationalized national educational policymaking and the ways that related trends in educational policymaking either constrain or shift to meet particular needs and challenges within specific national contexts. After discussing the phenomenon and the impact of globalization on international educational governance, the role of the state, and some examples of both contextualization and bounded rationality, the impact of national policy convergence is discussed. This chapter concludes by summarizing the ways that national policy convergence became the focus of international educational governance and national educational policy based on the same ideas and structure through seemingly different implementation, but often-identical measurable outcomes. Examples from Japan and Saudi Arabia highlight the discussion.

This chapter presents and discusses the value of cultural political economy (CPE) as a theoretical framework for the analysis of the international governance of education. CPE is situated historically as a contemporary example of attempts within the Marxist tradition to explore the relations between the cultural (the world of discourse and practice), the political (actors and institutions), and the economic. The chapter builds on the developed account of CPE to address the challenges presented by the European Union (EU) as an example of international governance. Established accounts of the development of an EU role in the governance of education since the launch of the Lisbon Strategy in March 2000 are examined so as to establish what a CPE approach can offer to attempts to complement and transcend them. In conclusion, the chapter acknowledges the aspects of CPE that remain undeveloped and problematic as well as underlining the terms upon which the CPE as presented here might need to engage with other theoretical approaches.

International rule-governed activity also includes nonstate actors on the national as well as on the international and transnational levels. This chapter first discusses the relationship between educational governance and regime theory, then some observations on the theoretical perspective and the analytical categories are outlined. Second, a concise discussion of regime theory is presented and a definition of an emerging international education regime (IER) is elaborated, including some of the key elements and features that illustrate the adopted theoretical framework. Third, the chapter addresses some methodological questions and presents one possible research design to discuss empirical implications of an emerging IER.

Against the background of a changing relation between the state and “its” education system, the present contribution focuses on two concepts that can be used as tools in order to explain the current transformations. “Governance” is more concerned with technical issues: with instruments and modes, procedures and actors, and with their constellations and forms of cooperation. It focuses research on questions such as: who provides educational services or what is the connection between public and private education. It has been employed to investigate the relation between the various levels of analysis and has proven particularly useful in creating an adequate theoretical understanding of the role of international organizations in shaping educational policies. Sociology and political science are the two disciplines most prominently associated with elaborating the concept under various perspectives. Governmentality, although sharing many characteristics with governance, is a Foucauldian term concerned with the generation of different subjectivities and collectivities through techniques and modes of ruling and guiding in an encompassing sense. A governmentality perspective thus focuses investigations on the typical Foucauldian knowledge/power nexus. While “governance” may be said to be more descriptive, more concerned with the “how” of current transformations, “governmentality” may be drawn on to argue that the changes are related to a reworking of the very modern Weberian notion of rationality, thus stressing the morphodynamics but not the reinvention of education. At stake is the increase of effectivity in order to augment and increase the “usefulness” and thus the value of the population.

This chapter relates the Foucaultian concept of “governmentality” to the sociological body of work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular emphasis on his reflexive sociology and critique of power. Although there are some natural connections between Foucault's and Bourdieu's work, there are enough differences to critically advance Foucault's studies of power from the perspective of Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, and in so doing identify areas for further discussion and research.

In Turkey, almost all high school graduates take private courses in order to be successful in the university entrance examination. The application of students for entering an institution of higher education is decided based on their rank in the examination results. One of the unintended outcomes of this measurement process is that high school education is overshadowed by the “examination event” and becomes for all intents and purposes dysfunctional. This chapter discusses the contradictions arising from an increasing dependency on private university preparatory institutions within the framework of public responsibility where education is conceptualized as a fundamental right. Turkish “private preparation courses” are analyzed in terms of their characteristics, which deepen the preexisting inequalities of the educational system and as a result their function as an instrument of “normalizing judgment.”

Assessments are a technical key element of new governance strategies. The implementation of output steering methods into the German education system is accompanied by an attempt to substitute approved semantics by implementing an external re-description of educational processes. As education cannot rely on causal technology, terms such as market, competition, entrepreneurship, and commodification render the organizations of the education system into a paradoxical situation. Their typical practice of loose coupling is frustrated by accountability and responsibility claims. The new order to “tightly couple” is accompanied by the call for technical solutions and management competencies of the staff. What happens when organizations have to cope with expectations they cannot meet? This chapter discusses the question of how the semantic shift from the term professional to classroom manager profoundly affects the essence of established pedagogical thinking and acting.

Education and education policy have been set up and run under the control of the nation-state since the origins of modern education systems. Thus, national education systems have been exposed to strong political and normative control from the very beginning. The analytical perspective on issues concerning political regulation and governance of education systems was for a long time state centered and norm oriented. Even if this is still true to a varying extent in many countries, we recently witness a shift in the examination of issues concerning educational governance. This chapter examines educational governance with respect to the topical discourse in Germany and identifies significant actors, governance instruments, and governance practices. It points out that the appearance of new instruments of educational governance coincides with and supports an emerging governance model in the educational field: evidence-based education policy. Drawing on empirical findings from an international comparative project at the University of Tuebingen,11The international comparative project was partly funded by the Hans-Böckler Foundation. The project goals were to reconstruct the concept of lifelong learning with respect to its political and empirical aspects and to examine its implementation into national and international monitoring and reporting systems on education and training. The project was based on the theoretical approaches of path-dependent development and actor-centred institutionalism both emanating from political science. Using this theoretical framework, OECD's and EU's educational policies and activities with respect to monitoring lifelong learning have been analyzed and compared to demonstrate their adoption among differently structured national systems (Germany, Finland, and Greece) and to comment on their influence upon the evaluation, design, and governance of national education systems. The methods applied were document analysis, expert interviews, and meta-analysis of educational monitoring and reporting systems. Germany, the chapter focuses on educational monitoring and reporting as new instruments of educational governance, reveals their impact, and claims that the new governance instruments are based on knowledge and expertise.

Using evidence from the Reguleduc European research experience, the pertinence of a “multilevel” international comparative analysis may be called into question. Reguleduc research, on one hand, links data on European educational systems’ modes of regulation collected from various empirical entry points (national, local academic spaces, and educational establishments) and, on the other hand, interprets the games of a number of actors at different levels from varied social perspectives. There is at once a recognition of necessity, partnered with an acknowledgement of the difficulties, of an international comparative analysis combining levels of analysis and contexts to observe and interpret change in modes of regulating school systems.

Analyzing educational evaluation not only implies investigating its goals, methods, and dimensions, but also studying the rationale behind it. The present contribution relates this rationale to the interests and the goals set by the agents involved in the formulation and implementation of educational evaluation. When it comes to the evaluation of higher education in Brazil, the specific topic of this chapter, those agents are not restricted to the scope of public departments and boards of education; also included are national and international companies as well as inter- and supranational organizations that directly or indirectly set up quality and efficiency standards for educational processes. Particularly, the rationale and the goals of the higher education evaluation models developed in Brazil from the 1970s up to the present will be focused on, highlighting the close relationship between educational assessment and educational regulation.

This chapter starts with a short discussion of social work and how it interlinks educational issues with forms of support to enable people to cope with difficult situations. An example shall illustrate that a global perspective on questions of governance in social work has to consider the historical, economic, and political context in which it takes place. It will then be argued that “governance building” might be a fundamental necessity in strengthening the empowerment of people, and this means accepting the ambivalence of support and control. In this context, some distinguished authors will be identified who considered social movements as motors of governance bringing in normative aspects, which cannot be reduced to functional theory. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on the role of research in defining support programs in welfare states.

S. Karin Amos is professor of education with a special emphasis on comparative and multicultural education at the Eberhard Karls University at Tuebingen. Her research interests include the role of education in the construction of societal membership, transnational educational governance, and cultural studies and education.