Session Information
MC Keynote C, What is Wrong with the What-Went-Right Approach in Educational Policy?
Keynote Speaker
Contribution
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.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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