Florian Waldow

Rethinking the Pattern of External Policy Referencing: Media Discourses over the "Asian Tigers" PISA Success in Australia, Germany and South Korea.

The article compares how the success of the ‘Asian Tiger’ countries in PISA, especially PISA 2009, was depicted in the media discussion in Australia, Germany and South Korea. It argues that even in the times of todays ‘globalised education policy field’, local factors are important in determining whether or not a country becomes a reference society for educational reform. The article aims to uncover some of these factors, identifying the globally disseminated stereotypes about Asian education, economic relations and the sense of ‘crisis’ induced through the relative position and change of position in PISA league tables in the countries in question.

Undeclared imports: silent borrowing in educational policy‐making and research in Sweden

Research on educational policy borrowing has mostly focused on explicit transfer processes, often highlighting how explicit reference to the international has served legitimatory purposes in the borrowing country. In contrast, this paper focuses on ‘silent’ borrowing, i.e. non‐acknowledged processes of policy transfer. The paper argues that keeping processes of policy transfer ‘silent’ can also follow a logic of legitimation, depending on which patterns of legitimation are favoured in a political culture. Three propositions are argued in the paper, using the case of Sweden as an empirical example: (1) educational policy‐making in Sweden has been heavily influenced by international discursive currents; this, however, has largely been left unacknowledged by policy‐makers; (2) The educational research community has largely followed the official image of policy‐making in its exclusive focus on the national context; and (3) Silent borrowing was so prevalent in Sweden for a long time because political culture was characterised by a powerful myth of rationality and national superiority, favouring strategies of legitimation other than explicit borrowing.

Standardisation and 'quick languages' : the shape-shifting of standardised measurement of pupil achievement in Sweden and Germany

The article discusses the entry of standardised measurement into the educational systems of Sweden and Germany and the processes of shape‐shifting associated with this process. In the first part of the article, we investigate how standardised measurement challenged existing ways of conceiving education in Sweden and Germany during the first half of the twentieth century, leading to the introduction of a system of national tests in Sweden, but not in Germany. In the second part of the article, we explore standards‐based reform in Sweden and Germany contemporaneously, including the role played by standardised measurement in this process. We analyse how psychometrics functioned as a ‘quick language’, i.e. a shorthand means of communication in educational matters, and the role it played in processes of shape‐shifting of standardised measurement, i.e. transformations in directions very different from that which early proponents of standardised measurement had envisaged.

Finland Has it All? Examining the Media Accentuation of "Finnish Education" in Australia, Germany and South Korea.

Drawing on the conceptual work of externalisation in comparative education and multi-accentual signs in cultural studies, this article examines how the print news media accentuate ‘Finnish education’ in the process of inserting this external reference into the domestic political discourses around education reform in Australia, Germany and South Korea. The study identifies all articles referencing ‘Finnish education’ that were published from 2000 to 2011 in two widely circulated newspapers with different political orientations in each country. Discourse analysis of the articles shows various ways in which ‘Finnish education’ is accentuated by the newspapers, serving to legitimise different political agendas in education policy debates. It is argued that ‘Finnish education’ has become a ‘projection screen’ for competing conceptions of ‘good education’ and the associated visions of ‘good society’. The authors situate the findings within the ongoing discussion of externalisation, calling for a careful conceptualisation of the role of the media in this line of comparative education scholarship.

Projecting images of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad school’: top scorers in educational large-scale assessments as reference societies

Abstract Researchers interested in the global flow of educational ideas and programmes have long been interested in the role of so-called ‘reference societies’. The article investigates how top scorers in large-scale assessments are framed as positive or negative reference societies in the education policy-making debate in German mass media and which functions they fulfil. Top scores in large-scale assessments do not automatically promote a country to the status of a positive reference society. Whether top scorers are perceived as positive or as negative reference societies depends largely on stereotyped prior perceptions that determine how success in these assessments is framed. Among the functions positive and negative reference societies fulfil are making educational reform agendas more plausible and serving as projection screens for conceptions of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ school.

Economic Cycles or International Reform Models? Explaining Transformations of the Educational Policy‐making Discourse in Sweden, 1930–2000

The relationship between education and the economy is a basic component of the educational policy‐making discourse. This article analyses the changes that occurred in the construction of this relationship in Sweden from 1930–2000. Based on a large sample of government committee reports, the paper investigates two explanatory hypotheses for the changes in the construction of the relationship between education and the economy: (1) the influence of structural cycles of economic development (as proposed by economic historian Lennart Schön) and (2) the influence of the international educational reform discourse as produced by organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD). It is shown that economic cycles may have a certain influence in the beginning of the period studied, although later the empirical results do not fit the hypothesis derived from the cycle model. At the same time, there is a surprisingly strong degree of isomorphism between the Swedish and the international discourse throughout the entire period, although most actors do not realise this, or at least do not make it explicit.

From ‘silent borrowing’ to the international argument - legitimating Swedish educational policy from 1945 to the present day

The article analyses how education policy-making was legitimated in Sweden in the time period 1945–2014, focussing particularly on international points of reference and using reports of government committees (‘Statens offentliga utredningar’, or SOU) as an indicator for the policy-making discourse. The article detects a shift in how policy agendas were justified that ca. 2007. Before the shift, international reference points were hardly ever used as an argument for reform in policy-making, despite the fact that Sweden in many ways participated in the international education policy-making mainstream. This changed around the year 2007, when the ‘international argument’ became prominent in the education policy-making discourse as a legitimatory device and justification for change. The article argues that this shift is connected to declining Swedish PISA results and a changed perception of these results in Sweden.

Expertenwissen für Bildungsreformen

Eine Leitidee der zeitgenossischen internationalen Bildungsreform lautet, die Padagogik in ein Feld evidenzbasierter Praxis zu verwandeln. Im Kern geht es darum, ein Wissen zu generieren, das nicht nur empirisch fundiert ist, sondern auch anwendbar und veranderungsrelevant. Angesichts dieser Anforderungen uberrascht es nicht, dass die entsprechenden Bemuhungen im englischsprachigen Raum unter dem Slogan „What works“ firmieren: Was zahlt, ist das, was funktioniert und sich zur Verbesserung einer fur unzulanglich erachteten Gegenwart eignet.

Commentary to Part III: Why Is “Being International” So Attractive? “Being International” as a Source of Legitimacy and Distinction

The commentary chapter argues that the quality of “being international” is now commonly used as a source of legitimacy and distinction both by individuals and organisations. “Being international” is a concept particularly well suited to these purposes because it is relatively vague and therefore open to a range of interpretations. Partly because of this conceptual indeterminateness, it can be easily connected to a wide range of other educational concepts and desired outcomes and can therefore be agreed on as a goal by quite diverse coalitions of actors. The commentary piece concludes by arguing that “being international” may have become one of the rationalising and legitimating “myths” (in the neo-institutionalist sense) surrounding and thereby shaping education.

Mass Schooling: A Local Game with Global Rules

Sociological neo-institutionalism, especially the strand developed by John Meyer and colleagues at Stanford University, provides a powerful conceptual framework for understanding the development and diffusion of mass schooling alongside the emergence of a world cultural environment based on Western values (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Krücken, 2005). With National Differences, Global Similarities, David P. Baker & Gerald K. LeTendre have added another significant contribution to the impressive neo-institutionalist research record. Against the widely held view that the particular characteristics and problems of an educational system are attributable to a unique nationor culture-specific set of circumstances, the main thesis of National Differences, Global Similarities is that there is a global institutional model of schooling which pervades education in all its aspects. According to Baker & LeTendre, schooling as it manifests itself in educational systems around the world can only be understood adequately by taking into account the institutional properties of this ‘world culture of schooling’. This is in keeping with the central tenets of the neo-institutionalist approach; however, unlike much neoinstitutionalist work that has investigated the global diffusion of the ‘world culture of education’ on a very high level of abstraction and aggregation, Baker & LeTendre go on to explore how the global institutional model of schooling is intertwined and interacts with local contexts. Empirically, the book is mainly based on the data sets created by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1994 and the TIMSS repeat study in 1999. Therefore, the book focuses on mathematics and science instruction, but the authors expressly claim their results to be valid for schooling as a whole. In nine chapters (Chapters 2 to 10), some of which were written together with colleagues, Baker & LeTendre discuss nine aspects – or ‘tales’, as they prefer to call them – of how the global institutional model of schooling interacts with local contexts. All of these chapters are based on articles previously published elsewhere. The authors start out from three basic propositions, which they term ‘subplots’ of their nine ‘tales’: