Education Policy Borrowing: Panacea or Anxiety Meds?

The world of educators recently shattered when the PISA 2018 results came out. PISA is an international assessment of students' knowledge in math, reading, and science. The assessment is developed by OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and has been conducted since 1967. After more than 50 years of operation, PISA examines and compares outcomes of 79 education systems arranging them in a list from high- to low-achievers. Policymakers, teachers, and parents look to find their country in the rankings to either receive justification for the current education reform or anxiety and urge to change the status quo. While one may say that such comparisons set “blueprints” for education, foster the environment of competitiveness and development of educational practices, and give policymakers the referent point to move forward, it is important to look at the transfer of policies from one country to another, and examine why, how and what is transferred between education systems and whether such policy borrowing and lending are actually meeting the needs of students and educators.

So is there something wrong with policy borrowing? Why should we not learn from South Korea on how to teach math? Or how schooling is organized in Estonia? 

Learning from others does not harm. However, the implementation of practices from other countries and their sustainability is highly debated by researchers. 

The borrowed policy is never just a borrowed text. The rational approach to policy borrowing suggests that we may replicate some features of education settings. For example, Ukraine recently adopted a new curriculum that promotes competency-based education (which relates to outcome-based education and is broadly discussed in higher education settings around the world) and teachers’ certification process laying out the avenue for teachers’ evaluation, which is a highly debated topic in the U.S.  When I was in Ukraine, I observed how these policies mutated, merging with existing practices, leaving teachers sandwiched between new ideas and existing practices.  

The policy is a process that includes discourses around phenomena. Texts can fly over borders, but perceptions, beliefs, and values of people who will deal with the change might be different. This estrangement in values and perceptions may cause several ramifications such as education reforms, implementation dips, policy mutations and resistance or sabotage of change. This can be observed in several cases, for example, certification of teachers in Georgia (Akiba, 2013). Researchers examined the perception of teachers in Georgia on certification and concluded that the certification process instead of a collaborative environment within the teaching profession (which was the primary aim of the policy), created the opposite, hostile environment. One may argue that competition is perceived differently in (post)socialist settings. Another example is an effort to introduce citizenship education in Egypt in the 1970s which failed due to the lack of opportunities to practice civic engagement skills in the society under the authoritarian regime of Mubarak (Galegher et al, 2018). 

Thus, the socio-cultural approach to policy borrowing suggests focusing on the recontextualization of policy, which requires rigorous study of the education phenomena in education from anthropological, sociological, historical and cultural angles to avoid misleading actions. For example, it may not be obvious that students in South Korea perform great on the PISA test because they spend 14 hours per day on education, which was called “no play culture” due to the high competitiveness within the country and shortage of opportunities. Or, we may observe that Finland dropped down this year which some explained by increasing diversity of students who are coming to schools. All in all, there are many factors influencing the performance of students. 

The borrowed policy is never neutral. While borrowing the policy, we should ask ourselves: what are the agendas of the borrowers and lenders? Policy borrowing and competition in education fostered by the range of international organizations like OECD, World Bank, etc., whose primary purpose is to develop a market economy. As a result, as Silova (2012) describes, we may observe the prevailing neoliberal discourse in education, meaning that education became subordinate to the market-economy and is expected to produce an adequate labor force. While this narrative is prevalent, it mutes other possible avenues for development in education. To give an example, we can continue reinforcing functionalism developed by Durkheim at the end of the 19th century saying that every person should play a function in society. But if so, we should acknowledge that we are stuck reproducing the present system of education and lamenting about the “global education crisis” as the market changes faster than any education reform. Or we can listen to other ideas for education that rest on self-formation, open an opportunity for experiments, focus on the development of an understanding of the present conditions and disposition to critique introduced by Foucault (Ball, 2019). 

Of course, this approach would require a rethinking of the curriculum, a transformation of teacher-student relationships, development of community-based practices, and acceptance of extreme dosage of uncertainty and ambiguity. Thus, policy borrowing may look like a justification of many decisions taken by governments, which pretty much reminds an anxiety pill. The question is if it really gives a solution and relevant learning experience to students in specific contexts.

References

Akiba, M. (2013). Teacher reforms around the world: Implementations and outcomes. Bingley: Emerald.  Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehighlibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1170006.

Ball, S. J. (2019). A horizon of freedom: Using Foucault to think differently about education and learning. Power and Education, 11(2), 132–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/1757743819838289

Galegher, E., Park, M., Cheng, A. O. Y., Davidson, P., & Wiseman, A. W. (2018). A Comparative Analysis of Educational Policy for Citizenship following Political Transitions: A Case Study of Egypt, Nepal, and Hong Kong (p.p.108-132), in J. A. Pineda-Alfonso (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Education for Participation Citizenship and Global Prosperity. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Silova, I. (2012). Contested meanings of educational borrowing. 10.13140/2.1.1645.5042.

Liliya Borovets
College of Education
Lehigh University