Educational Policy Borrowing Research Articles

Professional learning communities and teacher well‐being? A comparative analysis of primary schools in England and Finland

The article is a comparative analysis of the policy and practice of professional learning communities (PLCs) in primary schools in England and Finland. The concept of PLC has become a globally fashionable one and has been explicitly advocated in policy documents in both countries. Drawing from a database of qualitative semi‐structured interviews with primary teachers, four key themes affecting their work and well‐being are identified: the primary school community; collaborative working; continuing professional development and trust and accountability. The realities of PLCs as experienced by primary teachers in each country are contrasted. Similarities in teachers’ responses were found, especially in examples of education policy borrowing. However, the different cultural contexts in each country resulted in some fundamental differences that strongly influenced the nature of, and possibilities for, school PLCs. While ideal notions of PLCs may be difficult to realise, it is argued that it is an important concept worth developing for its potential contribution to teacher well‐being.

The politics of international league tables: PISA in Japan’s achievement crisis debate

Using the political‐economic analysis of globalisation and education as well as a culturalist approach to education policy borrowing, the paper analyses the role of local actors, specifically, national newspapers and the Ministry of Education, in mediating the potentially homogenising curricular policy pressure of globalisation exerted through the PISA league tables. Using the recent Japanese education policy debate as a case study, the author demonstrates how the Japanese media interpreted the PISA 2003 findings in a way that resonated with the specific cultural, political, and economic context of the time and how the Ministry used the findings to legitimise otherwise highly contentious policy measures. Questioning the conventional interpretation that the PISA 2003 shock caused the Ministry to redirect its controversial yutori (low pressure) curricular policy, the paper reconstitutes the Ministry as an active agent that capitalised on an external reference (PISA) to re‐establish its political legitimacy in a time of increasing neo‐liberal state‐restructuring.

Educational Policy Borrowing: Historical Perspectives

Educational Policy Borrowing: Historical Perspectives

Non-Traveling ‘Best Practices' for a Traveling Population: The Case of Nomadic Education in Mongolia

This article deals with a particular ‘best practice’ in Mongolia (boarding schools) that neither traveled elsewhere nor was rescued from the socialist past and adopted in the post-socialist present. The boarding schools accommodating children from nomadic herder families have experienced a long decade (1991–2003) of neglect. The boarding school system of the twenty-first century has ceased to be a universal institution catering to a nomadic population, and has been transformed into a socially stratified system that mostly attracts students from poor families (nomadic and otherwise) who could not afford to entertain alternative living arrangements for their school-aged children. The authors treat nomadic education in Mongolia as an interesting case of a ‘transfer vacuum.’ The authors investigate the political and economic reasons for this immunity towards ‘lessons from elsewhere’ or ‘lessons from the past,’ and draw conclusions for research on educational policy borrowing and lending.

Processes of Policy Borrowing in Education: some explanatory and analytical devices

This paper addresses questions of policy ‘borrowing’ in education. Building on the authors' previous work, it proposes some explanatory and analytical devices to assist in the exploration of the processes involved in ‘cross-national attraction’ in educational policy and its consequences in terms of decision making, implementation, and ‘internalisation’.

What Does Globalization Mean for Educational Change? A Comparative Approach

What Does Globalization Mean for Educational Change? A Comparative Approach

The Politics of Educational Borrowing: Reopening the Case of Achimota in British Ghana

Reflexion theorique sur Achimota, symbole du transfert pedagogique effectue entre les Etats-Unis, l'education industrielle des africains americains et le continent africain. Les auteurs reflechissent a la raison de ce transfert et aussi au mode d'implementation et de realisation du transfert en fonction des contextes economiques, geographiques et historiques.

The Politics of Education Policy Borrowing

Cross-national policy borrowing rarely has much to do with the success, however, defined, of the institutional realisation of particular policies in their countries of origin; rather, it has much more to do with legitimating other related policies. On the other hand, active policy borrowing involving the appropriation of identifiable aspects of another country's policy solutions, including ways of implementing and administering them, is more likely when there is some synchrony between the characteristics of the different education systems involved and the dominant political ideologies promoting reform within them.