Shaping Education Policy is a comprehensive overview of education politics and policy during the most turbulent and rapidly changing period in American history. Respected scholars review the history of education policy to explain the political powers and processes that shape education today. Chapters cover major themes that have influenced education, including the civil rights movement, federal involvement, the accountability movement, family choice, and development of nationalization and globalization. Sponsored by the Politics of Education Association, this edited collection examines the tumultuous shifts in education policy over the last six decades and projects the likely future of public education. This book is a necessary resource for understanding the evolution, current status, and possibilities of educational policy and politics.
The past thirty years have seen a rapid expansion of testing, exposing students worldwide to tests that are now, more than ever, standardized and linked to high-stakes outcomes. The use of testing as a policy tool has been legitimized within international educational development to measure education quality in the vast majority of countries worldwide. The embedded nature and normative power of high-stakes standardized testing across national contexts can be understood as a global testing culture. The global testing culture permeates all aspects of education, from financing, to parental involvement, to teacher and student beliefs and practices. The reinforcing nature of the global testing culture leads to an environment where testing becomes synonymous with accountability, which becomes synonymous with education quality. Underlying the global testing culture is a set of values identified from the increasing literature on world culture. These include: education as a human right, academic intelligence, faith in science, decentralization, and neoliberalism. Each of these values highlights different aspects of the dialogue in support of high-stakes standardized testing. The wide approval of these values and their ability to legitimate various aspects of high-stakes testing reinforces the taken-for-granted notion that such tests are effective and appropriate education practices. However, a large body of literature emphasizes the negative unintended consequences – teaching to the test, reshaping the testing pool, the inequitable distribution of school resources and teachers’ attention, and reconstructing the role of the student, teacher, and parent – commonly found when standardized, census-based tests are combined with high-stakes outcomes for educators or students. This book problematizes this culture by providing critical perspectives that challenge the assumptions of the culture and describe how the culture manifests in national contexts. The volume makes it clear that testing, per se, is not the problem. Instead it is how tests are administered, used or misused, and linked to accountability that provide the global testing culture with its powerful ability to shape schools and society and lead to its unintended, undesirable consequences.
This book examines the ways education reform has been shaped in China. Focusing on the past education policy development, it offers unique perspectives to illustrate China’s education reform and provides an overview of policies and their implications. In addition, the book discusses educational development, educational value, educational efforts and educational tasks and explores physical, aesthetic and labor education, as well as the management of off-campus training institutions and the policies on abolishing the “Five Only” in contemporary China. Conceptualizing the education reform model in China since 1949 for the first time, the book maps Chinese education policy development.
Did you ever wonder if education has a role to play in stemming the obesity epidemic sweeping across all OECD countries? Or what the impact of increasing urbanisation might be on our schools, families, and communities? Or whether new technologies really are fundamentally changing the way our ...
Education systems operate in a world that is constantly evolving towards new equilibria, yet short-term crises may disrupt, accelerate or divert longer-term evolutions. This Framework for Responsiveness and Resilience in Education Policy aims to support policy makers to balance the urgent challenge of building eco-systems that adapt in the face of disruption and change (resilience), and the important challenge of navigating the ongoing evolution from industrial to post-industrial societies and economies (responsiveness).
Did you ever wonder what the impact of climate change will be on our educational institutions in the next decade? What does it mean for schools that our societies are becoming more individualistic and diverse? Trends Shaping Education is a triennial report examining major economic, political, social and technological trends affecting education.
In this book Joel Spring explores three major international educational ideologies that are shaping global society: neo-liberal educational ideology, human rights education, and environmentalism. Neo-liberal ideology reflects a rethinking of nationalist forms of education as the nation-state slowly erodes under the power of a growing global civil society. Traditional nationalist education attempts to mold loyal and patriotic citizens who are emotionally attached to symbols of the state, whereas the goal of neo-liberal educational ideology is to change nationalist education to serve the needs of the global economy. These changes are fueling a clash between the ideas of free-market and consumer-based neo-liberals and those of human rights and environmental educators. Human rights education is concerned with creating activist global citizens. It is rooted in the idea that inherent in human rights doctrines is a collective responsibility to ensure the rights of all people. Environmentalism is the most radical of the ideologies because it rejects the industrial and consumerist paradigm that has dominated most economic thought, including capitalism and communism. Spring synthesizes and analyzes the effect of these educational ideologies on shaping the future of the global society. In the concluding section, he compares the effect of these ideologies on global society with the possibility of a world divided between conflicting civilizations. How Educational Ideologies Are Shaping Global Society: Intergovernmental Organizations, NGOs, and the Decline of the Nation-State features: *a critical exploration of the transition of schooling from a function of the nation-state to a globalized economic and political system; *a discussion of the major organizations and trading blocs shaping the future globalization of educational policies; *an analysis of the major competing global ideologies of education--including national and corporate models that emphasize training workers for a competitive global free market; the worldwide network of human rights and peace educators who are teaching a global set of ethics; and the environmental movement's efforts to create a common set of educational standards for sustainable development and sustainable consumption; and *an exploration of the possible future of global educational policy and school organizations. By integrating a wide range of previously scattered information within a bold new framework for understanding educational ideologies and their impact on the global society, Spring raises important questions for researchers, professionals, and students in history and philosophy of education, educational policy, educational studies, comparative education, multicultural education, curriculum studies, critical media studies, global studies, human rights education, and related areas.
This book explores how to shape a high-quality education system in contemporary China’s education policy system. The high-quality education system includes several dimensions, such as teacher ethics, school–family cooperative system, teacher promotion, the balanced compulsory education system, the integrated rural and urban education, pre-schoolings, special education system, diversified high school system, vocational education, world-class universities, minority group education, private education, off-campus training, and online education system.
Did you ever wonder whether education has a role to play in preparing our societies for an age of artificial intelligence? Or what the impact of climate change might be on our schools, families and communities? Trends Shaping Education examines major economic, political, social and ...
