Session Information
23 SES 11 C, Learning about Leadership Challenges and Strategies in Nationwide Education Reform: Twenty Years after Kazakhstan’s Independence
Symposium
Contribution
Recently in Kazkahstan, laws have been put into place that are beginning to shift the locus of control from the Ministry of Education and Science to individual campuses. These reforms are significant. However, they pose a significant leadership challenge. To understand how leaders are making sense of these changes, a research team from the U.S. and Kazakhstan visited 25 universities in 7 cities in Kazakhstan over the past three years. Three key findings emerged from that work: First, Kazakhstan has a legacy of preexisting structures from its Soviet past when it had a planned, central control. These limit the degrees of freedom leaders have to enact reforms. Second, there are cultural norms and beliefs that are impeding reform efforts. As Yergebekov and Temirbekova (2012) conclude, ‘The leading hindrance is the fact that Kazakhstan’s higher education system is still in continuity with the Soviet frame of mind’ (p. 1476). This emphasizes central control, dependency and is not charactersied by an emphasis on autonomy. A third factor influencing reforms is the environment. A World Bank report on Kazakhstan (OECD/World Bank, 2007) underscored the importance of reforming higher education, raised questions about quality, critiqued the inflexibility of the highly bureaucratic and highly centralized system and encouraged a movement towards greater autonomy, and discussed the implications of adopting the Bologna framework. This paper situates the reform strategies within the global context and examines how these reform aims fit ideas advocated by the New Public Management (Christensen & Laegred, 2001; Christensen, 2011), incuding a focus on internationalization and the fostering of international partnerships and the introduction of ‘best practices’. We see at work the sorts of isomorphic tendencies described by institutional theorists (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983.) The system is seeking positive changes by mimicking the practices of developed systems elsewhere. There has been insufficient capacity building for many leaders to fully understand the intent of these reforms. Kazakhstan will need to help higher education leaders understand what it means to function effectively in a more market-based system with greater institutional autonomy, as well as alter the policy context so leaders have greater degrees of freedom to actually attempt innovations, without being bound by ministerial rules and regulations. Finally, reform efforts will have to focus on helping academic leaders unlearn the assumptions that have guided them for much of their careers to move beyond a culture of risk aversion and deference to central authority.
References
Christensen, T., & Lægreid, P. (2001). A transformative perspective on administrative reforms. In T. Christensen & P. Lægreid (Eds.), New public management: The transformation of ideas and practice. Aldershot: Ashgate. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American sociological review, 48(2), 147-160. doi: 10.2307/2095101 Merrill, M. (2010). Central Asia: Increasing Under Diversity. International Higher Education, 59, 26-28. OECD – World Bank (2007). Higher Education in Kazakhstan. Reviews of National Policies for Education. Paris: Author. Yergebekov, M & Temirbekova, Z. (2012). The Bologna Process and Problems in the Higher Education System of Kazakhstan. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 47, 1473 – 1478.
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