Abstract
This study of education governance, edited by Andrew Wilkins and Antonio Olmedo, presents a fascinating collection of chapters from experienced scholars in the international field. It is part of the Bloomsbury Social Theory and Methodology in Education Research series, edited by Mark Murphy, who is a contributor to this volume. As the cover claims, it offers a range of innovative theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, which will appeal to both early-career researchers and students who have an interest in the practical application of theory to explore complex global and national changes in education governance and accountability.
It provides case studies of applied social theory via engagement with theorists such as Deleuze, Foucault, Bourdieu and Habermas. In his foreword, Kenneth Saltman warns against a new order where ‘theory, argumentation and evidence’ are being replaced by institutional authority and decontextualized numbers (p. xx). Wilkins and Olmedo’s track record of research around quasi-markets, technocratic cultures, democracy and the encroachment of ‘big business’ interests into global education is reflected in the themes in this collection.
The book is divided into four parts, or ‘regimes’: Data Regimes; Evaluation Regimes; Knowledge Regimes; and Institutional Regimes. The individual contributors take up the call in Wilkins and Olmedo’s introduction to challenge the legitimization of the voices supporting a neo-liberal agenda.
Data Regimes presents a series of discussions around the authors’ concerns with the digitization of education data across the world. With the increasing involvement of big business and the marketization of learning, these chapters pose issues in relation to human agency, where the authority lies, and who controls education governance. For example, Ben Williamson, drawing on Gulson et al.’s policy-network analysis, presents a case study of how the global education company, Pearson, could be seen as enacting ‘algorithmic governmentality’ through its data-visualization, machine-learning and artificial-intelligence developments. Greg Thompson explores some of the implications of the call for greater personalization of learning. Using Stiegler’s work on technological systems (‘technics’), and their relationship to memory and time, Thompson argues that digital technologies are a form of education governance that ‘require placing time and the temporal at the centre of the enquiry’ (p. 44). Sam Sellar and Kalervo Gulson use the conceptual tools of disposition and situations to critique how data in school systems arrange people and things and ‘shape thinking, values and beliefs’ (p. 63), through an examination of the development of data infrastructure in Australian school systems, illustrated by two, contrasting, case studies. Their determination to explain the differences in the two infrastructures beyond economic terms, is welcome.
In Evaluation Regimes, Jacqueline Baxter presents a fascinating insight into school inspectors’ roles in England (the wider research also includes Sweden), from their own perspectives. Using a constructionist narrative enquiry approach, Baxter’s research reveals hidden tensions within roles and practices. Whether inspectors see themselves as policy implementers or policy shapers, this approach is crucial to understanding how power relations influence governance practices. Nelli Piattoeva applies Actor Network Theory to the Russian Education Aid for Development Trust Fund (READ) to explore the role of assessment metrics in assembling transnational governance networks.
In Knowledge Regimes, Natalie Papanastasiou studies market hegemony within England’s academies programme, through political discourse theory – in particular, a critical logics approach, based on the work of Glynos and Howarth. The rise of test-based accountability (TBA) is examined by Antoni Verger and Lluis Parcerisa, in a comprehensive scoping review of key literature in the field. Studying documentation from UNESCO, the World Bank and OECD, amongst others, they attempt to identify reasons, factors and actors behind the international dissemination of TBA. A thoughtful examination of how the media in Chile shape education discourse is framed, using Bourdieu’s fields analysis, by Eduardo Santa Cruz Grau and Cristian Cabalin, through interviews with journalists. That the power rests with the political education elite is possibly not surprising, but the overt manner in which certain voices are foregrounded makes for sober reading.
In Institutional Regimes, Bourdieu’s field theory is again applied, together with an auto-ethnographic approach, by Ondrej Kascak and Branislav Pupala. They explore how pre-school teachers in Slovakia can participate more effectively in education discourse and governance. Murphy explores the relevance of Habermas’s colonization thesis and his critical sociology of bureaucracy to current educational issues. He suggests that Lipsky’s ‘street-level bureaucracy’ framework would be useful to the study of the crisis of responsibility and accountability that results from the encroaching privatization of education. Howard Stevenson concludes the volume with an overview of leadership and management in schools in England over the past 30–40 years. Using Braverman’s labour process theory and Goodrich’s ‘frontier of control’, he brings his analysis up to date with a critique of multi-academy trusts. He concludes that, rather than school leaders being seen as a crucial part of ‘transformational leadership’, they have become a ‘new cadre of scientific managers focused on maximizing teacher output and controlling almost every aspect of their work’ (p. 223).
There is honesty from the editors that the inter-disciplinary presentation of research methodologies has highlighted inconsistences in this field of research, challenging what they regard as a more traditional but accepted school of thought. It has thus resulted in ‘wobbly and rickety intellectual terrains’ (p. x), where fresh approaches and questions challenge accepted dogma. Reading these chapters in one sitting, which no sensible individual would normally attempt, I had the impression that I was in a room packed with extremely knowledgeable researchers, each with an important piece of the jigsaw which would contribute to our understanding of the trajectory of global education governance. That they have given us insight into their research toolbox, with which we can go on to explore our own interests in this area, is to be highly commended. The book is a valuable contribution to this area of research.