What is Wrong with the What-Went-Right Approach in Educational Policy?
Chairperson: Lejf Moos, EERA President
Place: FFL - Aula Magna
Date/ Time: 20 September, 14:00 - 15: 00
The keynote presentation analyzes the global race over identifying system variables that explain system performance, often narrowly defined in terms of student learning. Using the World Bank as a case study, the presentation shows that international organizations often hide behind a façade of precision to empirically substantiate their claim for having found “best practices” and exporting them to other educational systems. Typically, they extract a few system variables from these “best-performing school systems” to determine benchmarks which they tend transplant to poorly performing educational systems. In the process, they transfer their own portfolio of “best practices” from one country to another.
There is a long-standing tradition in comparative policy studies to investigate such policy borrowing processes; also known as lesson-drawing, cross-national policy attraction, or the what-went-right approach. The presentation draws on the policy borrowing literature and demonstrates that in the local policy context the what-went-right approach comes across as “international standards” and configures as a third, quasi-external global force in agenda-setting. It helps to build policy coalitions but also leads to hampering evidence with regard to local needs. This is because, more often than not, the global solution precedes the definition of the local problem. As a result, local problems are defined in ways that justify the import of “international standards” or match the portfolio of “best practices” whi h supposedly was assembled based on empirical studies of what went right in other countries.
Biographical Note
Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Dr. phil. (University of Zurich), is Professor of Comparative and International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.She was the 2009/10 President of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) and published extensively on globalization, policy borrowing, and comparative policy studies in education. Most recently, she co-edited (with Florian Waldow) the 2012 World Yearbook of Education on Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education.
More information is available under: www.tc.edu/faculty/steiner-khamsi.
