Conference Agenda

The two-part symposium presents conceptual, comparative as well as single-country studies that examine the neoliberal reform wave which most governments bought into over the past thirty years. In concert with Verger, Fontdevila and Parcerisa (2019), we refer to this reform package as School-Autonomy-with-Accountability (SAWA). The objective of the studies presented is to move beyond the simple documentation that neoliberalism spread worldwide and instead examine who the political coalitions were that bought into, or resisted, respectively the reform wave, what features of the reform resonated and why they held appeal, what features were repealed and how national policy actors translated key policies into the varied national contexts. These type of research questions are prototypical for research interchangeably labeled policy borrowing, policy transfer, policy mobility, or policy circulation research (Steiner-Khamsi, 2021). The panel attempts to advance both policy transfer research as well as comparative public policy studies by inserting a transnational lens into the analysis of policy processes.

The unit of analysis of all presentations is the SAWA reform. We consider SAWA to be a coherent, pervasive, and controversial reform package that (i) claimed to ensure quality improvement, (ii) advocated for (or at least aligned with) policies to set in motion competition among schools and differentiation in the school offer, such as school-based management and school choice (iii) instated a bundle of policies that strengthened school autonomy under the condition of pervasive accountability, and (iv) advanced a set of preferred policy instruments to trigger and sustain organizational change such as continuous standardized testing and other forms of external supervision. The panelists use this quadruple differentiation of fundamental reforms—their mission, mechanisms of change, bundle of policies, and policy instruments—to reflect the vernacularization or translation of the reform package, that is, what exactly was adopted by which political actors and in which particular political context, and why some features of the reform packaged resonated more than others.

In this panel, the presenters draw on the policy instrument approach which has triggered a lively debate within public policy studies more broadly (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007; Béland et al. 2018; Capano and Howlett 2020) as well as more narrowly in policy studies related to the education sector (Verger et al. 2019). Several aspects of that approach are appealing for policy transfer research, notably, the insight that the choice of policy instrument is deeply political and has repercussions in who is empowered and who disempowered. Drawing on that approach, we differentiate between the reform goal, reform elements, and the instruments to achieve the goal.

The presentation makes a case for contextual, qualitative comparative analysis that takes into consideration the temporal and space dimensions of policy transfer and disaggregates a reform by its policy goal (theory of change), bundle of policies, and policy instruments. The disentanglement helps to specify what exactly has traveled, and why. In an attempt to illustrate the interpretive framework used for contextual comparison, it draws on two recent co-authored publications on the selective borrowing of the school-autonomy-with accountability (SAWA) reform in Switzerland (Steiner-Khamsi, Appius and Nägeli, forthcoming) and Iceland (Steiner-Khamsi, Jóhannesdóttir, and Magnúsdóttir, forthcoming). The two studies provide an opportunity to reflect on methodological lessons learned for advancing scholarship in qualitative comparative policy studies, in particular research on policy transfer. A special focus will be placed on the temporalities of the SAWA reform in the two countries. In addition, it discusses methodological aspects of how to compare national receptions and translations against a global script, here against SAWA. The study compares the three reform waves, identified by Bromley et al, (2023) based on their analyses of the World Education Reform Database (WERD). The presenter chooses to label the three reform waves as (i) (equal opportunity, (ii) school-autonomy-with-accountability, and (iii) student-wellbeing reforms. She discusses how the three reform waves differ in terms of their policy goal but also their bundle of policies and the choice of preferred policy instruments. The WERD database is the most comprehensive database that exists to date on education reforms globally. It contains over 10,000 policy documents from over 180 countries over the period 1970 - 2020. The database has been developed by Patricia Bromley (Stanford University) and Rie Kijima (University of Toronto) and their associates. It is publicly available here: https://werd.stanford.edu/.

Bromley, P., Furuta, J., Kijima, R., Overbey, L., Choi, M. & Santos, H. (2023). Global determinants of education reform, 1960 - 2017. Sociology of Education, 96 (2), 149 - 167. DOI: 10.1177/00380407221146773 Steiner-Khamsi, G., Appius, S., and Nägeli, A. (forthcoming). School-autonomy-with-accountability: Comparing two transfer spaces against the global script. Steiner-Khamsi, G., Jóhannesdóttir, K., and Magnúsdóttir, B. R. (forthcoming). The school-autonomy-with-accountability reform in Iceland: Looking back and making.

This presentation draws on a forthcoming publication with the same (tentative) title (Steiner-Khamsi, Jóhannesdóttir, Magnúsdóttir, forthcoming). Our study draws on the existing Icelandic scholarship complementing a retrospective analysis of the reform as well as a retroactive interpretation of it. There are three conceptual and methodological features of this study that deserve special mention here: First, we conceive of the NPM reform, also known as the school-autonomy-with-accountability reform as a complex reform with its own (i) theory of change, (ii) a mix of school-autonomy-with-accountability (SAWA) policies, and own (iii) policy instrument to achieve and sustain change. Unbundling the reform package and dissecting its elements affords us to examine why some of the NPM policies resonated at the time with practitioners and policy makers, and others did not. We also show how the selectively borrowed NPM policies were subsequently translated and recontextualized in ways that would address the challenges of upper secondary schools. Second, the study introduces a novel method of inquiry for understanding the fundamental reform in upper secondary schools retroactively: We held several Meaning Making Meetings (MMM) with politicians, policy makers, education experts and policy advisors in Iceland in which we presented our preliminary findings in order to solicit feedback and validation on factual information. Finally, we collectively look back at these MMM to assess which of the NPM/SAWA policies endured, which ones were suspended, and which ones were modified over time, and how and why. In other words, we apply the temporal dimension of policies to examine the lifespan of a policy, that is, we determine when a policy was conceived, when it died, and—not unimportantly—what life it had in between.

Steiner-Khamsi, G., Jóhannesdóttir, K., and Magnúsdóttir, B. R. (forthcoming). The school-autonomy-with-accountability reform in Iceland: Looking back and making sense.

Since at least the 1980s, countries all over the world have prioritized the improvement of educational quality. The amount of education reform globally increased dramatically beginning in this decade and continued through 2010 (Bromley et al. 2023). Quality reform discourse around the world increased both in absolute number and as a proportion of all education reforms during the peak decades of this wave of reform. While countries continued to adopt reforms to expand equitable access to education, a defining characteristic of this recent education reform wave is the dramatic increase in reform discourse focused on improving a narrowly defined conception of quality related to learning outcomes and constrained by what can be quantified and measured (Overbey 2023). What explains the dramatic rise cross-nationally in national education reforms to improve educational quality? To answer this question, this study draws on education reforms from the World Education Reform Database (WERD) adopted in 143 countries between 1960 and 2018. Using negative binomial regression modeling, the study analyzes how factors related to a country’s need or capacity to improve quality, such as the level of economic development, level of democracy, or features of the national education system, may explain variation in the amount of quality reform a country adopts. Alongside country characteristics, the analysis also considers the role of global influences on national quality reform discourse such as a country’s linkages to international civil society and participation in international assessments. The results of the analysis show some positive association between country characteristics and the level of quality reform discourse. Countries with strong democracies with an active domestic civil society are more likely to adopt quality reforms. The results also show that global influences also play an important role. Countries with stronger linkages to world society, as measured by the amount of international non-governmental organization (INGO) memberships and the amount of education related research it produces. Countries that have historically participated in more assessments are also more likely to adopt quality reforms. The results lend support to arguments that the dramatic rise in quality reform discourse is part of the broader global cultural process of rationalization in the approaches to improve education and the scientization of educational problems that underlie the increase in measurement, data, and research observed during the decades of neoliberal education reform (Schofer et al. 2003).

Bromley, Patricia, Jared Furuta, Rie Kijima, Lisa Overbey, Minju Choi, and Heitor Santos. 2023. “Global Determinants of Education Reform, 1960 to 2017.” Sociology of Education 96(2):149–67. doi: 10.1177/00380407221146773. Overbey, Lisa. 2023. What's in a Wave? The Content of Neoliberal Education Reforms, 1970–2018, Wiseman, A.W. (Ed.) Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2022 (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 46A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 91-105. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-36792023000046A007 Schofer, Evan, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez, and Gili S. Drori. 2003. Science in the Modern World Polity: Institutionalization and Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Since the 2000s, school-autonomy-with-accountability (SAWA) reforms have circulated globally across diverse education systems. As a global reform package, SAWA’s transferability lies in the malleable nature of its instruments and principles, to which multiple rationales and goals can be attached. However, globalization studies often focus on cases of successful transfer of reform ideas and instruments –with their specific contextual adaptations– but overlook instances where, despite adoption efforts, transfer did not occur (Marsh and Sharman, 2009). Put differently, if conditions for transfer existed and attempts were undertaken, what circumstances led to its failure? Or what aspects were selectively borrowed and which were not? This paper explores this puzzle by examining the different degrees of SAWA adoption in Argentina and Colombia. Argentina and Colombia shared neoliberal economic recipes during the 1990s, have decentralized education governance with strong teachers’ unions, and tight links with international organizations, such as the OECD. During the 2000s, while different right-wing coalitions governed Colombia, embracing New Public Management reforms, Argentina was led primarily by left-wing Peronist governments, except for a short period (2015-2019). Two decades later, these countries have diverged on what SAWA instruments were adopted and for what purposes, resulting in quite different governance arrangements. Hence, this study follows a comparative and historical approach to understand under what circumstances, for what reasons, and to what extent the different SAWA instruments have been adopted, recontextualized, and recalibrated in Argentina and Colombia. It focuses on the adaptations, functions, and deployment of two main SAWA components: school autonomy and national scale assessments. Data for this study comes from policy documents’ analysis and interviews (n=68) with decision-makers and key informants in Argentina and Colombia. This presentation concentrates on two government administrations of intense reform activity in each country, the second term of Santos’ presidency in Colombia (2014-2018) and Mauricio Macri’s government in Argentina (2015-2019). Delving on historical institutionalism (Thelen, 1999) and policy borrowing research (Steiner-Khamsi, 2021), the paper unpacks the role of teachers’ unions and political coalitions, the constraints imposed by institutional settings –i.e., federal vs. unitarian government– and the domestic and international political and economic contexts in shaping instruments trajectories. In brief, reform efforts resulted in different policy outcomes in each country, marked by institutional rigidity and political backlash. The study points to the importance of local political and economic contexts behind global reforms and contributes to policy studies research by tracing and comparing cases of successful and failed policy transfers.

Marsh, D., & Sharman, J. C. (2009). Policy diffusion and policy transfer. Policy Studies, 30(3), 269–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442870902863851 Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2021). Externalisation and structural coupling: Applications in comparative policy studies in education. European Educational Research Journal, 20(6), 806–820. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904120988394 Thelen, K. (1999). Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 2(1), 369–404. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.369