Education Policy Agenda Research Articles

Going Beyond Academic Integrity Might Broaden our Understanding of Plagiarism in Science Education: A Perspective from a Study in Brazil.

Fostering innovation and creativity is a priority in the science and education policy agenda of most countries, which have advocated that innovative minds and processes will boost scientific and economic growth. While our knowledge society has embraced this view, fostering creativity is among the major challenges faced by educators and policymakers. For example, plagiarism, which may be considered a form of imitation and repetition, is a global concern at schools and universities. However, most discussions focus on academic integrity, which, we believe, leaves some gaps in the approach to the problem. As part of an ongoing project on plagiarism, science and education policy, we show results from a survey sent to 143 high-school science teachers at one of the most highly regarded federal schools in Brazil. Among respondents (n=42), about 50% admit that students plagiarize in assignments. Additionally, many of these educators suggest that the way biology, chemistry and physics are taught at school stimulates more repetition than creativity. Our findings are consistent with the need for a broader perspective on plagiarism and with initiatives to stimulate creativity and critical thinking among students. Although we offer a perspective from Brazil, it may illuminate current discussions on plagiarism, particularly in emerging countries.

From Student Engagement to Student Agency: Conceptual Considerations of European Policies on Student-Centered Learning in Higher Education

Student-centered learning (SCL) has entered center stage on the European higher education (HE) policy agenda after the Yerevan Ministerial Summit of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in May 2015. It has become the key principle underlying the intended reforms toward enhancing the quality of teaching and learning in European HE. Despite the universal appeal, SCL remains poorly defined in policy documents and this ambiguity potentially jeopardizes its implementation. The article addresses the different instances and evocations of the SCL approach in EHEA policies. Furthermore, it seeks to clarify the conceptual foundations of SCL. Two propositions are put forward. First, SCL should be understood as a ‘meta-concept’. Such an understanding serves as a corrective to the eclectic use of SCL in association with a broad variety of policy issues. Second, the article questions the suitability of student engagement as a conceptual foundation of SCL. The main argument is that student engagement conceptually fails to sufficiently address student autonomy, self-regulation and choice, all of which have been highlighted by the literature as essential elements of SCL. The root concern of SCL is not propensity to different types of student action as implied in student engagement, but rather student agency as students’ capabilities to intervene in and influence their learning environments and learning pathways.

Assessing the productivity of schools through two “what works” inputs, teacher quality and teacher effectiveness

This paper is a critique of the school education productivity evaluation and two research constructs germane to it, teacher quality and teacher effectiveness. The paper will argue that policy inceptions of teacher quality and teacher effectiveness proxy for the productive capacity of schools and more broadly, school systems. Student achievement scores as determined by high stakes testing are the school education outputs of policy significance in current times while inputs thought to matter are increasingly tapered towards the particular characteristics of classroom teachers, specifically their quality (usually credentials) and effectiveness (teaching behaviours). The paper finds that attributing school system success largely to teachers and their work, especially in terms of their classroom teaching practice(s), distorts the school education policy agenda so that evaluations of school productivity purely serve accountability purposes.

Houdingen van leerkrachten ten aanzien van ouders en hun emoties, reacties en gevoelens van competentie bij verschillende uitingen van ouderbetrokkenheid

Abstract Attitudes of teachers regarding parents and their emotions, reactions and feelings of competence in diverse ways of parental involvement: A case specific analysis Parental involvement has become salient in the educational policy agenda. To successfully implement parental involvement policy in the school teachers are of major importance. In their daily contact with parents, teacher attitudes, their emotions and their competences play a significant role. Teachers are expected to deal with a variety of ways in which parents show their involvement with their child’s education; with assertive ways of involvement, like overprotective or unsatisfied parents, but also with parents who do not respond to school’s invitations. In this study, it is investigated how primary school teachers respond to diverse ways in which parents are involved and how these responses can be explained by teachers’ attitudes towards parental involvement. The study involved a survey among 127 teachers. They were asked about their attitudes towards parental involvement and they were presented with three hypothetical cases in which ways of involvement were depicted (overprotective, unsatisfied, non-responsive to invitations). Teachers were asked about their emotional and behavioural responses in these cases. Analyses showed that teachers in general have positive attitudes towards parental involvement, that they feel competent and that they intend to respond with understanding and empathy to various ways of involvement and that they put effort in building constructive relationships with these parents. Teachers with positive parental involvement attitudes were most sympathetic to parents who do not meet the ideal-typical standards of parental involvement.

Governing the entrepreneurial mindset: Business students’ constructions of entrepreneurial subjectivity

Promoting entrepreneurship education to develop the entrepreneurial competences and mindsets of citizens has become an important mission on the supranational educational policy agenda. This endeavour constructs the ideal of a self-guided entrepreneurial subject who is active, adaptable and capable of tolerating uncertainty. Using the theorizations of governmentality, we attempt to discover in this study how entrepreneurial subjectivity is being constructed and negotiated among university-level business students. The data consist of the writing assignments of a group of students ( N = 24) enrolled in entrepreneurship studies in a Finnish university. The findings illustrate how entrepreneurial discourse, as a culturally appropriate manner to express oneself as a self-disciplined and self-governed subject, is adopted by students and reproduced in the practices of entrepreneurship education. We suggest that among educators the aim to educate entrepreneurial subjects should be recognised as a political, moral and, hence, negotiable objective, rather than as a value-neutral or imperative goal.

Entre la reforma y la disidencia. Experiencias de docentes formados para evaluar el desempeño desde la reflexión y la colectividad

El presente artículo es el resultado de sistematizar la experiencia de uso de un modelo de evaluación de desempeño docente basado en estándares, diseñado en México y probado en escuelas públicas mexicanas desde hace casi una década. Se inscribe en un momento en el que la evaluación del desempeño docente es tema de la agenda de política educativa y describe las implicaciones contextuales de la evaluación docente para la mejora; asimismo, analiza cada paso de la aplicación del modelo: registro de clase, valoración, conversación, elaboración de trayecto de mejora y seguimiento al trayecto. Los hallazgos muestran, entre otros, que es necesario tomar con seriedad que diversos actores escolares se involucren en la evaluación; que el modelo puesto en práctica desata un proceso de aprendizaje y coformación entre evaluadores; así como que, a partir de su evaluación, las y los docentes explicitan y amplían las expectativas sobre su quehacer, además que sitúan la mejora del mismo en los ámbitos individual y colectivo.

The Politics of Student Protest and Education Reform in Chile: Challenging the Neoliberal State

THE POLITICS OF STUDENT PROTEST AND EDUCATION REFORM IN CHILE: CHALLENGING THE NEOLIBERAL STATE1 Mary Rose Kubal Associate Professor, Department of Political Science St. Bonaventure University Eloy Fisher Chief Economic Adviser and Director Office of Economic and Financial Advisory of the Comptroller General of the Republic of Panama and Visiting Professor and Research Fellow of the Catholic University of Panama In 2006 at the beginning Michelle Bachelet’s first presidency (2006–10), a series of high school student protests escalated into the largest protest movement seen in Chile since the transition to electoral democracy in 1990. The scale of the protests took the Bachelet administration, the public, and even the student leaders by surprise. At the heart of their demands was the imperative to address the inequality of the neoliberal school choice system implemented during the Pinochet regime (1973–90). A new General Education Law (LGE) replaced the Pinochet-era education statute, but did not fundamentally change the structure of the school choice system. In 2011, during the conservative government of Sebastián Piñera (2010–14), university students led an even more protracted cycle of protests, demanding a new constitution and social welfare regime and major reforms in higher education. In the midst of continued protest and policy stalemate, Bachelet was elected to a second term (2014–18) promising a new constitution and a deepening of education reform. The recent cycle of student protests raises important questions regarding the nature of the interaction between the Chilean student movement and the country’s political establishment—with implications for education policy and the quality of Chile’s democracy. How did the student movement take advantage of and ultimately change the political context in order to achieve some of its policy demands? Why has the second Bachelet government been able to pass much of the education policy agenda it was unable to deliver four years earlier while student leaders remain dissatisfied ? In addressing these questions, we follow Meyer’s (2005) admonition to focus on “the relevant policy monopoly.” To understand the trajectory of the student protests and their outcomes, we take into account not only the institutional context and political interests of powerful state and societal actors, but also the power of ideas and discourses to circumscribe policy options and to exclude “non-expert” C 2016 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/tla.12075 217 The Latin Americanist, June 2016 actors from the policy field. As Baumgartner and Jones (2009, 7) observe, the ideas that support policy monopolies “are generally connected to core political values which can be communicated directly and simply through image and rhetoric.” In Chile, the rhetoric focused on consumer choice and the “depoliticization” of education policy. During the Pinochet regime “to have a political agenda at all was to distort the true workings of the market ,” which—despite its redistribution of economic resources to a powerful minority—was presented as “politically neutral” (Paley 2001, 199). Nowhere was this dynamic more stark than in education where consumer choice became the main avenue for participation. Under pressure to increase citizen participation, post-transition governments created a master discourse that “dissociate[d] the idea of change from the idea of confrontation” (Enrique Correa quoted in Donoso 2015, 11). “Technopols” from the governing center-left Concertación parties appropriated knowledge production to discount the experiences of popular social organizations and framed citizen demands for state resources as threats to democratic consolidation and outside of proper channels for participation (Paley 2001). This discourse with its emphasis on technical ability and expertise naturalized the exclusion of social actors from the policy making process. Within the education policy monopoly a highly technical “coordinative” discourse, grounded in public choice assumptions , made it difficult for social actors unfamiliar with the technical jargon and latest research findings to follow, let alone participate.2 We argue that the students’ ability to present a challenging discourse that called attention to the undemocratic nature of the policy process was an important mechanism for policy change. This framework helps us to bridge the gap between the social movement literature, which often treats the policy process as “a black box within the state,” and the public...

Systemic management of schools: the OECD’s professionalisation and dissemination of output governance in the 1960s

At present, European education policy, research and administration is dominated by a specific concept of reform, namely so-called output governance, whose rise to prominence in national contexts in the 1990s coincided with the advance of international tests of school performance such as PISA. In this article it is argued that there is much more to this form of governance than a phenomenon that arose “naturally” after the fall of the Iron Curtain. This is brought out by tracing the development of output governance within the OECD – which publishes the PISA reports – and highlighting the key factors, events and structures in its dissemination from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It is contended that output governance’s epistemological roots lie in military research on war and that it was professionalised during the cold war by institutions that were trying – by setting specific goals – to compensate for their negligible capacity to pursue input governance. The OECD is a textbook case of such an institution. Specifically, it is argued that the OECD professionalised and disseminated a form of output governance – forged chiefly in and catalysed by the United States – that promised to give the organisation greater control over national policies and administrative bodies and thus help it enforce its education policy agenda. In light of these insights it is concluded that – despite there being no compelling reason to do so – European states are increasingly embracing a form of educational governance that is fostering an expertocratic, decontextualised approach to school administration.

Deploying Foucauldian genealogy: Critiquing ‘quality’ reform in early childhood policy in Australia

The last two decades have seen the emergence of a global education paradigm that has reimagined education through the lens of neo-liberal ideology. Education policy agendas and discourses in current times are globally governed through transnational networks, which have increased the opaqueness of education policymaking. For critical policy researchers, the challenge is to respond with new methodologies that can capture and critique the increasingly diffuse, fractured nature of contemporary policy processes. This article presents one such methodology, where Foucauldian genealogy is used to construct a history of the discourse of ‘quality’ in early childhood reform policy in Australia. The genealogical approach is combined with ‘network ethnography’, which uses interviews with policy actors and the construction of policy network and mobility maps to undertake a governmentality analysis of discourse production. The preliminary findings emphasize the global spread of a positivist discourse of quality, and discuss its neo-liberal ideological ties and policy uses in Australian early childhood policy. The tactical use of human capital theory in the Australian Early Years Learning Framework is uncovered, wherein government discourse control resulted in the creation of learning outcomes for children, intended for use as a performativity structure.

Refueling the STEM and special education teacher pipelines

Improving the quality of the teacher workforce is high on the nation’s education policy agenda, but school systems continue to face difficulties in staffing STEM and special education classrooms with qualified teachers. This article documents the mismatch between the supply and demand of STEM and special education teachers in Washington State, where almost 4,000 more STEM and special education teachers have left the profession than have been produced by in-state teacher training institutions over the past 25 years. There are a number of potential solutions to this problem, including differential pay systems, reduced barriers to entry, and incentives for teacher training institutions.

Firing up craft capital: the renaissance of craft and craft policy in the United Kingdom

Crafts have recently been experiencing a renaissance. This revitalization sees craft increasingly recognised as a growing industrial sector with benefits linked to educational, cultural and economic development policy agendas. This paper engages with policy debates around the place of craft in the United Kingdom from 2010. Drawing on craft sector perspectives and UK government policy initiatives it situates the disciplines and practices of craft within their institutional support networks, organizational contexts and draws attention to the role of individuals in driving agendas. The paper focuses on the national facing crafts development organizations, the UK Crafts Council and the UK Heritage Crafts Association, alongside recent policy discussion emerging from the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Recognizing that the legacies of past practice often inform contemporary agendas, the paper explores how the advocacy of craft in the recent past has shaped the place and positioning of craft in contemporary UK politics.

Academische geletterdheid van studenten in het hoger onderwijs

Abstract Academic literacies of students in higher educationStudents’ academic literacies in higher education form a topic of current interest in education policy and research in The Netherlands, as in many other countries. It is therefore remarkable that in the last decades hardly any studies have been published on this topic in Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing, even more so since the (sub)discipline Taalbeheersing (Discourse Studies) was founded around fifty years ago in response to concerns about writing skills of students entering higher education. At present, such concerns have resurfaced on the higher education policy agenda in the Netherlands and Flanders, and the call for a sound scientific foundation of academic literacy teaching and learning practices is stronger than ever. Academic literacies can be studied as a process and as a result, as a condition and as an outcome, and from a social as well as from an individual perspective. The four articles in this special issue of Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing address students’ academic literacies from a variety of perspectives, and focus on issues pertaining to the competencies of students entering and leaving institutions of higher education.

Coming Out of the Shadows: Rethinking the Education Policy Agenda for Diversity and HBCUs

This chapter discusses how diversity has typically been presented in the HBCU scholarly work, and explores how HBCUs may connect more effectively with the American postsecondary policy agenda.

Mexico's Brain Drain

The Mexican press constantly expresses its concerns about brain drain, but, perhaps because its impact has been officially underrated, the matter has so far not appeared on the education research or policy agendas. While brain drain is calculated to involve only 5 percent of the students granted postgraduate studies abroad, that estimate is low—for the following reasons: (1) because it is based on findings from a sample used to evaluate the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) scholarship program over the past 30 years; (2) because it does not incorporate the free movers who have used alternative mobility channels to study abroad; (3) because the mobility of highly qualified personnel includes, other than the academic market, additional fields of endeavor such as, for instance, the productive sector; and (4) because the intention expressed by young Mexican PhD holders to remain in the United States after obtaining their degrees has increased (notoriously) in recent years—almost matching the preference of Argentines and Chileans with US doctorates to remain abroad. Given these factors, the brain drain estimation would vastly surpass 5 percent. However, to reach a reliable approximation of the phenomenon would require mobilizing financial and human resources and organizing joint cooperative programs—to develop linkages between highly skilled Mexican institutions and institutions located in their countries of origin—as well as recognizing the existence of a vexing problem that the public authorities have opted to ignore.

Policy path dependence of a research agenda: the case of Chile in the aftermath of the student revolt of 2011

The rapidly shifting higher education policy agenda in the aftermath of the students' movement of 2011 in Chile and its mismatch with Chile's research capacities in the field of higher education studies are analyzed to illustrate how research is path dependent on policy. I argue that a stable policy environment, where change is only marginal or incremental, begets research problems and questions squarely situated within the boundaries of the established rules of the game. Conversely, whenever policy swerves considerably off its expected path, knowledge may not be available to illuminate policy-making. The motif of disassociation between the policy field in the making with the availability of knowledge to support it is probed via the analysis of two policy proposals currently in Chile's new government agenda: introducing tuition-free higher education and assuming greater state oversight of teacher education programs.

Committees and Controversy

The increasingly common practice of engaging consulting firms to assist states with educational policy agendas requires an analysis of the role these consultants play in what is positioned as a democratic decision-making process. In this study, we examine the discourse of a state-level advisory committee formed to develop a new teacher evaluation policy under Race to the Top. We used discourse analysis methods to analyze audio recordings of 11 meetings of this committee. We identified two patterns of consultant talk as it related to committee decision making: making decisions through validationand deferring and redirecting decisions, and we describe their implications.

Sponsors of Policy: A Network Analysis of Wealthy Elites, Their Affiliated Philanthropies, and Charter School Reform in Washington State

Background/Context Charter school policy has evolved into a major component of the current education reform movement in the United States. As of 2012, all but nine U.S. states allowed charter schools, and in one of those nine, Washington State, charter school legislation was passed by popular vote in November 2012. There is a substantial, if contested, research base focusing on charter school effectiveness, particularly related to test score achievement, as well as an equally contested literature base on charter school enrollment selectivity, student expulsions, and increased segregation in charter school populations. Purpose The purpose of this study is to analyze the network of relations of policy actors surrounding the statewide campaign to pass the charter school Initiative 1240 in Washington State in order to better understand how wealthy individuals and their associated philanthropic organizations influence educational policy. Research Design Making use of available tax records, public election information, individual and organizational websites, and institutional and foundation databases, this study uses simple directed graphing techniques from social network analysis to analyze the complex relationships and affiliations of policy actors relative to the campaign to pass charter school Initiative 1240 in the state of Washington. Conclusions/Recommendations This study concludes that, compared to the average voter in Washington, an elite group of wealthy individuals, either directly through individual donations or indirectly through their affiliated philanthropic organizations, wielded disproportionate influence over the outcome of the charter school initiative in the state, thereby raising serious concerns about the democratic underpinnings of an education policy that impacts all of the children in Washington State. This study also concludes that elite individuals make use of local nonprofit organizations as a mechanism to advance their education policy agenda by funding those nonprofits through the philanthropic organizations affiliated with those same wealthy elites. In light of these conclusions, the authors recommend that a mechanism for more democratic accountability be developed relative to education policy campaigns, initiatives, and legislation.

Avrupa Denetim Sisteminde Okul Öz Değerlendirmenin Artan Rolü: İrlanda Örneği

The issue of school evaluation has risen to the top of the educational policy and research agenda in recent times. Most countries are seeking to drive greater quality in schooling through a blended approach involving increased autonomy linked to more intensive monitoring and accountability. School inspection is an important part of this agenda. In many countries inspection policies and procedures are being reviewed and reformed. In most cases policymakers are attempting to achieve the optimal balance between external inspection and the development of the capacity of schools and teachers to self-evaluate. Specifically, research indicates that there is a strong positive relationship between inspection which encourages school self-evaluation and capacity building efforts and the growth of key characteristics for improvement. Ireland is a good example of these developments. Self- evaluation is rapidly becoming a major part of quality assurance in education but the real problem is the difficulty of building the capacity in schools to genuinely engage in the process in a valuable and credible way.

Technologies, Democracy and Digital Citizenship: Examining Australian Policy Intersections and the Implications for School Leadership

There are intersections that can occur between the respective peak Australian school education policy agendas. These policies include the use of technologies in classrooms to improve teaching and learning as promoted through the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians and the Australian Curriculum; and the implementation of professional standards as outlined in the Australian Professional Standard for Principals and the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. These policies create expectations of school leaders to bring about change in classrooms and across their schools, often described as bringing about ‘quality teaching’ and ‘school improvement’. These policies indicate that Australian children should develop ‘democratic values’, and that school principals should exercise ‘democratic values’ in their schools. The national approaches to the implementation of these policies however, is largely silent on promoting learning that fosters democracy through education, or about making connections between teaching and learning with technologies, school leadership and living in a democracy. Yet the policies promote these connections and alignments. Furthermore, understanding democratic values, knowing what is a democracy, and being able to use technologies in democratic ways, has to be learned and practiced. Through the lens of the use of technologies to build digital citizenship and to achieve democratic processes and outcomes in schools, these policy complexities are examined in order to consider some of the implications for school leadership.

Educating child practitioners: a (re)turn to the university disciplines

This paper analyses a specific disjunctive policy space in Scotland involving the current key children's social and educational policy agenda, Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC), and a recent national report on teacher education, the ‘Donaldson Report’. In four main parts, the paper first introduces and applies in policy review and analysis a capitals frame to identify the policy–practice discontinuities currently inherent in the ‘GIRFEC-child practitioner education’ policy space, exemplified by the Donaldson Report. Then, the same capitals frame is applied to examine the capitals resources demanded in the particular ‘child–child practitioner education’ policy space previously delineated. Next, examples of policy disconnects amongst current child practice and practitioner education policy production and implementation, which warrant a concerted integrative cross-sector project to ensure coherent social and intellectual capital relations at all levels, are discussed. Finally, the paper calls for the governing professional registration bodies and universities involved in the education of child-sector practitioners to engage in the redesign of university programmes underpinned by principles of transdisciplinarity and transprofessionalism. The methodology is policy sociology and policy text analysis.