Since the 1980s, (nation) state education systems around the world are subjected to incessant and fundamental reform, becoming virulent in the shape of newly calibrated transnational governance structures. The ‘New Educational Governance’ includes instruments directed towards more de-centralized and indirect, output-/performance-oriented modes of control. International actors such as the OECD or the EU have promoted a growing global education industry. The advancing digitization, datafication, automation as well as the quest for evidence-based education have further changed the governance of education (e.g. Parreira do Amaral/Steiner-Khamsi/Thompson 2019). In many countries, the transformation of nation state bureaucracies has not only modified the organizational forms of educational regulation, but also the social relations of schooling in many ways, including the idea of teacher professionalism as an ethical practice and teacher unionism and the reconceptualization of policy goals of inclusion, social justice and democratic participation (cf. Brown/Wisby 2020; Biesta 2010). As it has been brought forward within overlapping discourses on the ‘post-national constellation’ (Habermas 1998), the crisis of democracy/Post-Democracy (Crouch 2004) and the fragmentation and neoliberalization of statehood (Ball/Bowe 2020; Brown 2015, 2018), by new processes of order-building, which are not based solely on nation-state sovereign action, the modern nexus of (nation)state, education and the democratic public itself is undergoing profound changes. So far, however, these developments have been discussed predominantly with a view to individual school systems at the national or sub-national level.

The symposium aims to discuss empirical findings from sociological studies with a focus on emerging global educational knowledge regimes (Paper 1) and dynamics within national contexts in a transnational and international comparative perspective. Thereby, empirical studies will be brought into dialogue with more normatively accentuated philosophical perspectives on education reforms as epistemological politics (cf. Ricken, 2011) and the political (e.g. Arendt 2002; Rancière 1999) dimensions of education (cf. Karcher, 2015; Biesta 2010). Thereby, we aim to explore their applicability as a more consistent framework to group these heterogeneous sets of developments.

The selected education systems – England, Turkey and Germany – represent different welfare-state traditions as well as political power constellations. In England, the NEG has the longest tradition and has been implemented in a particularly radical version (Paper 2). Turkey is one of the peripheral countries where neoliberal policies were forced upon the education system relatively early (in the 1980s), through military intervention and under close supervision of international agencies; these also resulted in ever strengthening of right-wing ideological dominance in the education system and favored the expansion of the private sector and informal working regimes affecting teachers (Paper 3). In Germany, policies of deregulation and performance-based school reforms have been implemented step by step from the 1990s onwards in a less radical way. However, with regard to the work of teachers, especially concerning issues of social justice and democratic education, converging developments are becoming visible (Paper 4).

Through these cases we will address the following questions: How is the inherent relation between the economic and democratic principles constituted, challenged, shifted through neo-positivistic evidence based educational policy-making? What pillars constitute the tension fields of social justice in economized knowledge arrangements? What concepts do data-based teaching practices provide to address and reflect social difference(s) and hegemony? How does the transformation of the institutional setting of schooling, in which requirements of plurality and inequality in migration societies are to be addressed, produce new opportunities for action towards inclusion in a Human Rights understanding or potential gateways for discrimination and exclusion? How is the increasing emphasis on teachers‘ professionalism and performance utilized against the teachers‘ rights (e.g. to have secure contracts or to organize), especially in the growing private sector?

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