Conference Agenda

In Rethinking Comparison, Simmons and Smith (2021) argue that comparative methods are at the cross-roads of two main trends: a trend towards controlled comparative methods whose main focus consists in the improvement of causal inference - something that often involves taking the route of natural experiments; and an opposing trend towards deconstructing comparison, heavily indebted to postcolonial theory, which sees comparative methods as ‘old fashioned’ and intellectually impoverishing. To these trends, we add a third one consisting of hyper-globalist understandings of globalisation that are challenging cross-country analyses, arguing that the state has been hollowed-out as the main locus of policy-making.

The comparative analysis of education policies is not alien to these challenges and advances. Indeed, such dilemmas have given rise to passionate debates and inspired a number of research innovations and increasingly ambitious research designs. Comparative education policy studies have proven to be a dynamic research field that does not remain passive against the different external and internal challenges it faces. This symposium examines precisely how the field of comparative policy analysis has evolved in the last decade, and how education policy research can benefit from this evolution. The panel aims thus at stimulating reflection on the possibilities opened by the new comparative methods, tools and databases, and on the research questions posed by this changing environment and which merit further investigation. To do so, our panel revisits two recurring debates that have long centred efforts at (re)thinking comparative research, namely, what to compare and how to compare. In relation to the former - what to compare -, we witness how comparative analysis is increasingly open to a broader range of research units. Beyond conventional cross-country studies, comparative research can be conducted within countries, across regions, across time and even compare different kinds of units (Schaffer 2015).

In addition, the role of globalisation in policy formation has been conceptualised in a more sophisticated way. Increasingly, comparative analyses contemplate how different political scales are mutually constituted, how global policy models are being translated differently in different contexts and/or how the impact global forces fluctuates over the policy process. Such trends make the case for expanding the possibilities and perspectives for comparative inquiry. Overall, rather than taking them as a given, we are being encouraged to actively construct the objects of our comparative analyses (Barlett and Vavrus 2017). In a European context, where policy is no longer the exclusive parcel of nation states, and regions and cities play an increasingly prominent role as policy spaces, transcending the cross-country perspective is more necessary than ever.

In relation to how to compare, the old divides between quantitative and qualitative approaches are being left behind. Mixed-methods designs have indeed found their place within European research, and there is a growing appetite for methodological pluralism. Contrary to traditional conceptions, it is increasingly acknowledged that small-n studies can play a critical role in offering generalisable insights and that big-n studies can play an important role in theory building and identifying causal mechanisms. There is also growing recognition of the need for further disciplinary cross-fertilization and dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences. The comparative analysis of education policy cannot remain insulated from the conceptual and theoretical innovations brought forward by political science, geography and policy sociology, among other.

This double-symposium will include papers that make an explicit effort to innovate in comparative analysis methods and forms of inquiry. It includes a selection of empirically rich studies of education policy covering different contexts and domains, including teacher policy, international large-scale assessments, the role of expertise, public-private partnerships, and accountability reforms.

The POLNET (Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison) study started out as a Norwegian study that explored how policy knowledge was produced and used, respectively, in Norwegian school reform (Karseth, Sivesind, Steiner-Khamsi, 2022). In the political system of Norway (as well as in Sweden), the Norwegian Official Commissions have an advisory role vis-à-vis the line ministries. Given POLNET’s focus on evidence-based policy decisions, we compared the “evidence” referenced in Green Papers, which were produced by these advisory bodies, with the evidence referenced in the White Papers, issued the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Similar to Norway, the Swedish political system also has policy advisory bodies in place that review past school reforms and make recommendations to their respective line ministry. As a corollary, we were able to apply identical sampling strategies to the Swedish POLNET study: we compared the production, as well as the use of evidence, between Green and White Papers. The other three political systems in the POLNET study (Denmark, Finland, Iceland), however, have different “expert-seeking arrangements” (Baek, 2020) or evidence-production/utilization mechanisms in place. Unsurprisingly, the incommensurability issue was at center stage at each stage of the five-country study, ranging from the initial stage of data collection (selecting the functionally equivalent entity of the Norwegian and Swedish Official Commissions) to the final stage of interpreting the findings of the country case studies. Different from the research question that accompanied the POLNET study from the onset—whose knowledge is used as an authoritative source to establish evidence and subsequently to justify evidence-based policy decisions—this investigation digs into the question of where policy evidence is produced and used, respectively, in vastly different political systems. To complicate the narrative, it is indispensable to take into account multi-centric governance (Cairney, 2020) or network governance (Ball and Junemann, 2012), respectively, and acknowledge that ultimately the political fabric of evidence production/utilization matters. Investigating functional equivalence is only a starting point. What is equally important, from a system’s perspective, is how the various entities within an expertise-seeking arrangement (advisory committees, hearings, stakeholder reviews, commissioned reviews, etc.) relate to each and how they, taken together, differentiate and distance themselves from non-expert arrangements. As a result, the comparison of different political systems always becomes a matter of translation: identifying what the structures, mechanisms, and entities for evidence production/utilization mean in a given political context.

Baek, C. (2020). Knowledge utilization in education policymaking in the United States, South Korea, and Norway: A bibliometric network analysis. [Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University]. Ball, S. J., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. University of Bristol and Policy Press. Cairney, P. (2019) Understanding public policy. London: Bloomsbury, 2nd edition. Karseth, B., Sivesind, K. and Steiner-Khamsi, G., eds (2022). Evidence and expertise in Nordic education policy. A comparative network analysis. New York: Palgrave. Open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91959-7

In this presentation, we reflect critically on the research design underpinning the TeachersCareers project (2017-2022) in order to contribute to the discussion on the potentialities and limitations of comparative methods in the contemporary era of globalization of educational policies. Funded by the European Research Council, the project grapples with the structural and cultural environments shaping the employment regimes of the teaching profession in the context of accelerated globalization. The project addresses two critical questions: how is the teaching profession (re)institutionalized in a globalizing world? And, how does globalization affect central mechanisms for the profession, such as its training and professional development models, modes of recruitment, and labor markets and careers? Based on a multiscalar study combining multiple sources of data and methods, the project innovatively analyzes the reconfiguration of teachers’ careers in Europe, with a focus on joint evolutions and intersections of the European Union (EU) governance, and in the two contrasting systems of England and France. Drawing on sociological and historical new-institutionalisms, the research design is developed to make sense of ongoing interactions between trajectories of institutional developments at different levels (European, national, local) with implications for teacher professionalism. For this purpose, the research design combines analyses of policy processes and structuration drawing on the concept of field and types of fields (Zietsma et al, 2017) to analyze the emergence and structuration of the EU teacher policy field, the dynamics and interactions between EU and national policy and professional fields, and longitudinal analyses of institutional development and change at the national level in France and England to capture evolutions in the employment regime of teachers (Thelen, 2014). The analyses are thus longitudinal at both the national and European levels. In the project, the policy analyses are mainly based on document analyses and interviews with key stakeholders, while employment and labor market studies cover a broad range of methods (comparative quantitative analysis of professional and employment regimes based on TALIS 2013 and 2018 data, longitudinal workforce analyses at the national level, labor market analyses in local spaces such as Lyon and London, and qualitative analyses of individual teacher career pathways). In discussing the challenges associated with such a complex research design we argue for the need of methodogical pluralism, well-defined research interests, and strong theorisation of the globalisation concept (Dumay & Mangez, forthcoming), in comparative education research.

Thelen, K. (2014). Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zietsma, C., Groenewegen, P., Logue, D.M., and Hinings, C.R. (2017). Field or Fields? Building the Scaffolding for Cumulation of Research on Institutional Fields. ANNALS, 11, 391–450.

Since it entered the comparative education research agenda decades ago, the privatisation of education provision has become a more complex phenomenon (Bellei & Orellana, 2014). Policies that fall under the umbrella Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly diverse and adopted with different objectives and through various instruments. In addition, such arrangements are found in an increasingly heterogeneous number of countries. For instance, public subsidies for private schools, frequently associated with countries of the Global North, are increasingly being considered in different countries of the Global South. However, as a consequence of the extensive evidence demonstrating the negative impact of education PPPs on equity, a debate has emerged in the past few years regarding the need of public regulation to counterbalance the educational inequalities associated with privatisation policies (Boeskens, 2016). Based on a systematic literature review, this paper aims to identify the different regulatory configurations of education PPPs and make sense of their recent evolution. The findings show how the policy objectives pursued with the adoption of education PPPs, as well as institutional factors and related path-dependencies, are crucial to comprehending the evolving configuration of regulatory frameworks. The research also identifies a cross-cutting trend to recalibrate existing regulatory frameworks in response to problematisation processes that brought to the fore the impact of private education on school segregation and social stratification between schools. In most cases, equity-oriented reforms are moving towards a command and control governance approach to the detriment of a market governance approach. New regulations tend to increase the role of the State in terms of educational planning, establishing norms and monitoring schools’ behaviour. The paper also reflects on three main challenges experienced during the research process, feeding into the current debate in comparative education policy studies. First, despite the global nature of education policies, such as privatisation and PPPs, cross-country comparability remains challenging due to the specific forms these policies take at the local level. Second, the increasing need for an interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical approach to capture the complexity of education policies poses a challenge to integrate these different perspectives consistently. In the case of privatisation, integration efforts are further complicated by ideological divides that continue to permeate the debate. Finally, while there is growing recognition of the multi-scalar nature of the privatisation phenomena, emerging regulatory trends point towards the need for a more systematic effort towards the categorisation and operationalisation of domestic drivers mediating in recontextualisation processes.

Bellei, C., & Orellana, V. (2014). What Does “Education Privatisation” Mean? Conceptual Discussion and Empirical Review of Latin American Cases. (ESP Working Paper Series, No. 62.) The Privatisation in Education Research Initiative (PERI). Boeskens, L. (2016). Regulating publicly funded private schools: A literature review on equity and effectiveness (OECD Education Working Papers, No. 147). Paris, France: OECD Publishing.

Performance-based accountability (PBA) has become a central instrument of school assessment, monitoring and improvement in European countries. This instrument has a great potential of shaping school organizational decisions and educational practices. PBA has cognitive and normative influence by framing policy representations, problematization processes and power games (Maroy and Pons, 2019). Educational literature documents how PBA has occasionally generated the conditions for improving students’ learning outcomes, but also numerous undesired side-effects, including the intensification of test preparation, curriculum narrowing and the adoption of non-inclusive practices in the classroom (Cohen-Vogel, 2011). Research also brings to the fore that teachers and other school actors creatively interpret and respond to PBA, generating inconsistencies between regulatory expectations and the context of practice (Hardy 2014). Our study starts from the theoretical assumption that the way teachers respond to policy prerogatives such as PBA is contingent on how these actors make sense of performance pressures within their broader social and institutional environments (Jabbar & Creed, 2020). Educational systems vary importantly in the way they regulate the teaching profession and in the procedures they put in place to monitor and guarantee quality education. We argue that these institutional features inevitably mediate the way PBA is enacted. At a more local level, we argue that the position that schools occupy in their local education markets is also crucial to uncover how teachers negotiate and process external pressures, and with what outcomes in terms of organization and educational practices. Part of the REFORMED project (www.reformedproject.eu), this research is unique in its attempt to unravel, from a cross-national perspective, the social mechanisms and conditions favouring different school reactions to PBA. The research follows a sequential mixed-methods design approach which integrates two different empirical stages. The first stage relies on an international database that includes questionnaire data administered to teachers (n = 3403) and school leaders (n= 625) from randomly sampled urban schools in Norway, Chile and Spain - countries that enact different PBA policies which vary in their density (thicker and thinner), and direction (vertical and horizontal). In the second research stage, we conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers (n=76) and school leaders (n=73) in the three countries.

Cohen-Vogel, L. (2011). “Staffing to the test” are today’s school personnel practices evidence based?. Educational evaluation and policy analysis, 33(4), 483-505. Hardy, I. (2014). A logic of appropriation: Enacting national testing (NAPLAN) in Australia. Journal of education policy, 29(1), 1-18. Maroy, C., & Pons, X. (2019). Accountability policies in education. A Comparative and Multilevel Analysis in France and Quebec. Cham: Springer.