Almost twenty years ago, Shilling (1993) claimed that modernity brought educational area a rapid change and the promise of control which in reality, high modernity is a ‘runaway world’ where we have no control over. The consequences of this “high modernity...have the effect of introducing a racial doubt as to what precise goals education should achieve. These consequences also throw into question whether education systems have the capacity either to be fully controlled, or to accomplish planned social change with any degree of accuracy” (Shilling, 1993, p.108). In an environment, where the educational policy making is probably a challenging process, expecting a problem-free policy borrowing within the international education systems would be unfair and vaporous. Therefore, We educational researchers should produce knowledge on `what works` as mentioned in the conference theme.This paper aims to develop context-sensitive threshold criteria for policy borrowing processes through analysing Turkish and Israeli cases. These two examples will inform the reader on how policy borrowing works/does not work in the borrowing contexts and discuss some practical implications that may be employed by researchers and policy makers.
Policy borrowing or policy transfer in education has been a widely used practice among developed and developing countries (Phillips & Ochs, 2003; Steiner-Khamsi, 2014). Although many publications testify to the reasons fostering policy borrowing, the cultural aspects involved have drawn less attention. These aspects are crucial especially for the borrowing countries since it may have negative consequences if contextual issues are not carefully considered (Auld & Morris, 2014; Ball, 1994; Heck, 2004).
While there are some debates on the appropariate title for this process (i.e. policy borrowing, policy transfer, policy learning, or policy lending) (Raffe, 2011), in this paper we consider policy borrowing a conscious and deliberate adoption in one context of policy observed in another (Philips & Ochs, 2004). Policy borrowing requires diligent planning and implementation within the borrowed context (Phillips & Ochs, 2003; Auld & Morris, 2014) based on a careful examination of the unique contextual characteristics of the lending and borrowing countires. Comparative education literature provides extensive analyses forming a conceptualization of policy borrowing. However, the literature seldomly offers comparative analyses that may testify to the implications of policies borrowed from on culture and implemented in other cultures Therefore, the purpose of this study is to understand the implications of policy borrowing by exploring the experiences and commonalities of the two countries.
Based on a description of policy borrowing processes implemented in the Israeli and the Turkish educational systems, the article offers some threshold criteria that may be employed by researchers and policy makers when considering policy borrowing. Specifically, the paper focuses on the borrowing of a constructivist curriculum in the Turkish educational system and a school-based management policy in the Israeli one. The experiences of Turkey and Israel with their respective borrowed policies provides contextual grounds for the empirical discussions of several scholars’ arguments on policy borrowing (e.g., Heck, 2004; Phillips and Ochs, 2003; Phillips and Ochs, 2000; Steiner-Khamsi, 2014).
