ABSTRACT
Two related questions are the focus of this chapter. The first is a question about policy, and in a period where bodies, capital and information cross borders with unprecedented scale and speed – it queries how well policy crosses these same borders. The second relates to queries about what the substantive consequences of attempts to move educational innovation and educational science from one cultural context to another, from one nation to another, from one jurisdiction and system to another, might be. This is all in an era characterized by moves towards a transnational management model of education where the focus is on the drive to standards, and where equity is couched in a new technical vocabulary of risk management, market choice and quality assurance. I write the chapter with an acute understanding of the shifting standpoints put
forward throughout the chapter, and a clear understanding that these shifting standpoints are as a result of my own journeys across borders. So I write as outsider and insider; born and educated as Chinese American, I have worked in Canada, Australia, Singapore and in numerous East Asian and Pacific Island education systems as a teacher, teacher educator, researcher and policy consultant. I have written critical theory and I also have been involved in large-scale empirical studies. My current research is on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander school reform in Australia. Ten years ago, I crossed the unmarked boundary between the university and government bureaucracy. I left an academic and leadership role at a large university and moved into the position of Deputy Director General and Ministerial Advisor, directing large state system reform in the state of Queensland: 1,200 schools, 40,000 teachers and a million students. From there I shifted across another set of borders and ten years ago, I helped establish Singapore’s first national research center in
education. This involved building that country’s first large-scale evidence base for government policy. The relationships between research and the making of policy, between policy
and classroom practice, between evidence and reform are not abstract. They are everyday problems facing politicians and bureaucrats, school boards, parents and principals, teacher educators and teachers. Additionally, matters of culture, ideology and political economy are not incidental burrs in the making and implementation of policy. They are essential considerations. Effective policy makers consider not just bureaucratic capacity and implementation, they also anticipate local uptakes and the likely collateral effects of policy. Courageous policy makers lead by building public understandings, engaging with complexity across real and imagined boundaries, moving towards durable educational settlements around shared values and social contracts. Such policy making requires a close eye on the local articulation and recontextualization of policy: a kind of narrative scenario planning based on rich interpretive historical, cultural and political understandings. A narrow managerial science cannot suffice such a task. Researchers, all of those who work in state systems and government and those
who sit on school boards or in university boardrooms, must raise troubling questions in current policy settings where we are all pushed to take on the new common sense of accountability through narrow metrics, and deal with standards that do not always do justice to what is educationally and culturally meaningful. Institutions in these neoliberal accountability contexts are involved in a process of silencing. There is a sometimes stated and sometimes unstated notion that critique is not productive, and even anti-scientific, that somehow foundational issues are irrelevant to the real politick of systems reform and policy business. These are important assumptions to resist, and this call to resistance is not a matter of romanticism or political correctness. Rather it is testimony to the fact that the normative, the cultural, and matters of value have quietly slipped from policy discussions (Ladwig, 2010), overridden by a focus on the measurable, the countable and processes of cost efficiency and quality assurance. After a decade of implementation of such centralized policy in the US and UK, there is ample evidence that the actuary’s approach can make for reductive approaches to educational science, short-term policy orientations and a plethora of collateral effects at the school and classroom level. In this chapter I will examine the scientific and policy rationales for transnational
and national standardization, focusing on two examples of policy export: early childhood standards in one of North America’s oldest indigenous communities and the development of international standards for university teaching. I then shift focus to the current calls for American educational systems to look elsewhere for reform and innovation – to Finland, Canada and Singapore – and document the cultural and political contexts of these places and systems. My aim is to address two affiliated issues: (1) the possibilities of a principled policy borrowing that begins from an understanding of cultural and historical context and (2) the possibilities for a meditative, multidisciplinary educational science that might better guide such an approach.
