Sigrid Hartong

Overcoming resistance to change: PISA, school reform in Germany and the example of Lower Saxony

During the last 30 years, a new model of transnational educational governance including a specific knowledge production regime has been implemented. Its increasing national impact has caused enormous change within the German educational system. Particularly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developments statistical reports and benchmarking procedures like the Programme for International Student Assessment have challenged the German system, which has usually been remarkably resistant to reform, and have pushed it towards fast and deep transformation. Demonstrated with the case of Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s largest states, effects of massive political uncertainty in terms of educational principles, rules of governance as well as school practice can be identified. They result in an increasing authorization of so-called agents of change who offer both knowledge production and education service to policy and school practice. In the case of Lower Saxony, the Bertelsmann Foundation has been such an agent of change. It supported school reform while heavily promoting the adoption of a new self-evaluation instrument called self-evaluation in schools, which not only measures school quality, but creates a new certainty by generating knowledge about what is perceived as being real within school practice. In the end, there seems to be evidence that both the teacher profession and the classroom practice are made susceptible – not only to this new reality, but also to a new leadership.

New structures of power and regulation within ‘distributed’ education policy – the example of the US Common Core State Standards Initiative

Abstract This article focuses on the growing development towards new forms of ‘distributed’ governance within current large-scale educational reforms. The emphasis is on so-called ‘governance through standards’ as a transformative reform complex which manifests itself in a simultaneous process of regulative destabilisation and (global) reconstruction of policy control. This newly emerging regulative policy ‘ensemble’ is found to be directly related to the growing collaborative activity of cross-field networks between governmental, non-governmental and private actors. Empirically, this article refers to the so-called Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative which has fundamentally reshaped US education policy since 2001. The initiative comprised the negotiation, implementation and controlling of supra-state core skill standards for K-12 education as the benchmark for other regulating instruments such as assessments, monitoring and teacher training. In the context of the CCSS, the aforementioned new structures of regulation can then be located within an entrepreneurial alliance around the non-profit organisation Achieve, Inc. Through its function as a core policy network manager, Achieve generated simultaneous practices of collaboration and distinction, discourse initiation and (invisible) norm stabilisation.

Between assessments, digital technologies and big data: The growing influence of ‘hidden’ data mediators in education

The past few decades have witnessed a global enforcement of ‘governance by data’ in education policy, including a significant increase of assessments and quantified evaluation. Within this context, this article focuses particularly on the intensifying evolvement of new (digital) information technologies and ‘mediated’ infrastructures of data flows. The premise is that such technologies and actors of mediation reveal a crucial potential for implementing a new mode of digitalized governmentality in education, which, as ‘governance by big data’, reaches far beyond policy, into educational administration, school practice and individual learning activities. The strategic mediation of (big) data in education (such as that generated through assessments) involves actors, structures and technologies that operate between policy, politics, administration, schools and individuals as well as between data production, consumption and the data itself, for example by applying practices of data visualization or technical data services around software and databases. However, as this article seeks to demonstrate, such mediators comprise various types of actors who operate very differently within the diverse sectors of education policy, indicating a highly ambiguous yet powerful composition of digitalized governmentality.

Towards a Topological Re-Assemblage of Education Policy? Observing the Implementation of Performance Data Infrastructures and "Centers of Calculation" in Germany.

ABSTRACT The ongoing trend towards educational globalisation has brought about various dynamics of education policy ‘rescaling’, resulting in a growing number of governmental arrangements, which are operating across traditional scales, levels or sectors of policy. This contribution takes up the conceptual frameworks of topological spatialisation and assemblage theory to better understand the pivotal role of new information technologies, data infrastructures and also the increasing power of ‘centers of calculation’ within education policy reforms that have been implemented in Germany after the launch of the Programme for International Student Assessment.

Observing the “Local Globalness” of Policy Transfer in Education

This article contributes to a growing body of research on global policy transfer and flows in education, arguing that a large number of such research has too often viewed nation-states as uniform policy containers, focusing mainly on national-level policy changes or using binary understandings of reform adaptation versus reform resistance. Consequently, it often neglected the internal complexities of nation-states, which include ambiguous modes of ongoing global-local “recontextualization,” local meanings of reforms, but also (changing) influence of national and local actors who may operate as policy “brokers.” Using data from an empirical case study on the German state Bremen, we illustrate how global-local policy dynamics played out locally in sequences of school structural reforms between 2002 and 2010. Hereby, we combine the theory of path dependency with the conceptualization of policy fields to better understand the various complexities and dynamics within a multilevel educational reform movement.

Observing local dynamics of ILSA projections in federal systems: a comparison between Germany and the United States

ABSTRACT By comparing two federal education systems, namely Germany and the U.S., and their reactions to PISA we show how international, large-scale student assessments (ILSA) have been used by national stakeholders to gain leverage for legitimising or de-legitimising policy reforms in education. From a neo-institutionalist perspective we argue that country-specific path-dependencies and policy legacies, such as different systems of power devolution, testing traditions and also non-governmental actor influence, additionally moderate the impact of ILSA.