Session Information
23 SES 10 B, Advocacy for Educational Policy Change: Strategies, Trajectories, and Lessons from Diverse Actors in Four Countries
Symposium
Contribution
A unique teacher training program is one response to the challenge of the achievement gap between children from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds. One such program is Teach for All that has thirty-five teacher education projects worldwide (Ellis et al., 2016). The Teach for Israel (TFI) program is the Israeli version of this movement, aiming at recruiting and training the country’s brightest graduates and placing them, for two years, in the weakest schools in the country’s social and geographic periphery. Twelve private philanthropic advocacy groups along with teacher education colleges and the Ministry of Education are involved in this initiative. Our research asks: What agenda is pursued by the advocacy groups through the TFI program and what effects does it have on teacher education policy? To reveal how the groups’ policy agenda challenges and strengthens the TFI program we employed new institutional theory which focuses on the technical and symbolic relationships between organizations and their institutional field (Meyer & Rowan, 2006). Using case study methods (Yin, 1994), we collected data by interviewing twenty-five of the program’s main policymakers and participants, observing program activities, and from documents. Our initial results show that the advocacy groups challenge existing teacher education policy in three ways: they offer generous student scholarships which enable a rigorous selection process that changes the definition of teacher quality; the two-year commitment changes the notion of a long-lasting teaching career; and the connection with the Teach for All global network challenges the importance of culture and context. Our initial conclusion, which could be relevant for other European countries (such as Norway and England) operating similar programs (Ellis et al., 2016), is that despite the new policy agenda the advocacy groups infuse into the program, they also enhance "rational myths" about the best ways of preparing teachers, placing them in influential positions, and of affecting the achievements of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
References
Ellis, V., Maguire, M., Trippestad, T.A., Liu, Y., Yang, X. & Zeichner, K. (2016) Teaching other people’s children, elsewhere, for a while: The rhetoric of a travelling educational reform, Journal of Education Policy, 31:1, 60-80, DOI:10.1080/02680939.2015.1066871 Meyer, H.D. & Rowan, B. (Eds.). (2006). The new institutionalism in education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Yin, R.K. (1994). Case Study Research Design and Methods. London: Sage.
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