Class Deals: Radical Policy Change and Urban Tracking Policies in Two Hungarian Towns

Author(s):

Eszter Neumann(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2012

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 05 D, Local Education Policy

Parallel Paper Session

Time:

2012-09-19

11:00-12:30

Room:

FFL - Aula 35

Chair:

Nafsika Alexiadou

Contribution

Along with other public policy fields, the elections of 2010 signal a major policy rupture in Hungarian public education policy-making. Concerning our qualitative inquiry focusing on the strategies of policy translation and enactment in two urban school systems, this condition poses a major challenge for the ongoing research. In the first phase that ended in early 2010, we identified models of urban regulation and policy enactment (Ball et al. 2011). In the current phase initiated in late 2011, we continue to follow institutional policy enactment strategies in selected schools applying ethnographic methods. More specifically, the classroom observations and the joint interviews explore how autonomy and control (Cribb&Gewirtz 2007) is being negotiated in a radically changing policy environment where the competency boundaries of policy actors have been blurred and became extremely indeterminate. The paper discusses how the meanings of autonomy and control gain new meanings at the town level, in the deals between the school staff and other child care professionals, and with the parents in reference to the enactment of tracking and elementary school enrolment policies.

Primarily exploiting the resources of the European Structural Funds, a comprehensive set of policies addressing the integrated education of disadvantaged and Roma pupils was realized between 2002 and 2010 (Neumann et al. 2010). The current government broke away from the ‘equity regime’ and codified a legislation that is told to respond the teachers’ vows and neglects the considerations about the schools’ role in social reproduction. While the decentralization of public services had been conceived as symbolic achievement of the regime change, the current government announced the centralization of the public education sector. The novel moralizing policy regime maintains professional and diplomatic relations with the European Commission on a superficial level, and also rejects negotiations with previously active national policy experts and develop a centralized regulatory culture that only involves a close circle of pedagogic practitioners. Consequently, in the past two years, schools have been working in a highly inconsistent, ambivalent and hardly calculable policy environment.

While keeping the main thematic foci of the research, we investigate how policy appropriation processes respond to the radical institutional restructuring and the public policy rupture. We discuss these issues through researching urban policy practices concerning the local (institutional, urban) cultures and specific classificatory procedures of sorting “problematic” pupils into classes. We assume that the unstable economic and policy context produce shifts in the perceived tasks of the school in relation to the social background of pupils, as well as in the applied strategies to tackle “problematic pupils”. In more general terms, the educational technologies associated with the European funds and the corresponding policy regime (i.e. competence based education and integrated education) that generated institutionally distinctive policy enactments are now being challenged by the national policy. In this respect, we interpret the paradigmatic change of national policy as an external constraint that opens a space for negotiating what is reconcilable with the institutional culture.

Method

The comparative institutional analysis relies on two years of fieldwork in two Hungarian towns, in which more than 300 interviews were carried out by the team of four researchers. Semi-structured interviews with street-level bureaucrats (teachers, school principals and other professionals), municipality elected officials and bureaucrats were the primary data source for the analysis. The analysis of narrative accounts was complemented with the study of a vast corpus of official school and municipality documents. Currently, the scope of investigation has been extended to classroom observations (Candela et al. 2004, Hammersley, 1990, Watson-Gegeo, 1997) and adjusted in-depth interviewing with the involved actors. The observations focus on how teachers negotiate and harmonize their autonomies with the requirement to meet local and national policies in the context of socially heterogeneous classes where “innovative”, competence-based pedagogical technologies have been introduced. As a validity check of the findings, extended group interviews were organized in the two towns with the participation of actors located at different regulatory levels. In the course of harmonizing their personal experiences, participants articulated their particular conceptions of the school organization and that of the competency boundaries of various regulatory agencies: in the whole, they negotiated the optimal local models of policy enactment.

Expected Outcomes

The ethnographic field work mostly takes place in the spring semester of 2012. In terms of expected outcomes, we assume that in the dense situations of negotiating the scope of teacher control and autonomy, the changing policy environment leaves its trace. Earlier we concluded that the two school systems display significantly different patterns of naturalizing policies in terms of managing the pupils’ ethnic and social differences (Vincent et al. 2010). While Town A resists leaving off the status-driven logic of organizing educational services and the selection of “integrateable” pupils gained high relevance, the municipality of Town B initiated major reorganizations in its school system according to the principles of accountability, transparency and equity. Our hypothesis is that local cultures of regulations naturalize new policies and also shape how the policy paradigm shift is dealt with. In the exploration of the micro-processes of the ongoing collective puzzlement about the interpretation of educational problems and the strategies of policy enactment in an unstable national policy environment, new policy initiatives adjust to existing local policy combinations. Finally, the findings also highlight the mid-term impact and appropriation processes of European policy regimes in a national policy environment that deliberately abandon mainstream European policy trends.

References

Ball, S. J., Hoskins, K., Maguire, M. and Braun, A. (2011) Disciplinary texts: a policy analysis of national and local behaviour policies, Critical Studies in Education, Vol. 52, No. 1. Ball, S. J., Maguire, M. and Braun, A. (2011) How Schools Do Policy, Policy enactments in secondary schools, Routledge. Candela, A., Rockwell, E. and Coll, C (2004) What in the World Happens in Classrooms? Qualitative Classroom Research, European Educational Research Journal, Vol. 3, No 3. Creswell, J.W. & Miller, D.L. (2000) Determining validity in qualitative inquiry. Theory into Practice, Vol. 39, No. 3. Cribb, A. and Gewirtz, S. (2007) Unpacking Autonomy and Control in Education: some conceptual and normative groundwork for a comparative analysis, European Educational Research Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3. Hammersley, M. (1990) Classroom Ethnography: Empirical and Methodological Essays. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Meyer, H.-D. and Brian, R. (2006) The New Institutionalism in Education. State University of New York Press, Albany. Neumann E. with Bajomi I. and Berényi E. (2010) The Politics of Seating Plans: Knowledge and Policy in the Integrated Education Public Action, Hungary 2002-2010. Research report. Simons, M., Olssen, M., Peters, M. (eds.) (2009) Re-reading Education Policies. Sense Publishers, p. 826. Van Zanten, A. (2007) A School Differentiation and Segregation in the Parisian Periphery: An Analysis of Urban Schools’ Logics of Action and their Effects, pp. 431-446. In: G. W. Noblit and W. T. Pink (eds) International Handbook of Urban Education, Springer. Vincent, C., Braun A. and Ball S. (2010) Local links, local knowledge: choosing care settings and schools, British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 279–298. Watson-Gegeo, K.A. (1997) Classroom Ethnography. In: Hornberger, N. H. and Corson D (eds) Research methods in language and education. Amsterdam, Kluwer Academic Press, pp. 135-144. Wright, S (1994) The Anthropology of Organizations. Routledge

Author Information

Eszter Neumann (presenting / submitting)

Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

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