Session Information
23 SES 03 D, Politics and Policy Making in Education
Paper Session
Contribution
This contribution looks at political parties and their ideas on education policy from a historical-comparative perspective. It presents empirical findings from an ongoing project comparing centre-left parties and their interpretation of comprehensive schooling in England and Austria since the 1980s.
Throughout the 20th century, education policy was a core concern for European social democratic and labour parties. Education was seen both as an end in itself, enabling the full development and emancipation of the individual, but also as a means for a more just society, reducing social inequalities and disadvantages. Comprehensive schooling belonged to the key education policy demands of European centre-left parties at least since the 1960s (Husén et al. 1992; Wiborg 2009). At its core, comprehensive schooling means that all children attend the same secondary school without being selected by ability into different hierarchical streams (such as grammar schools and lower level/vocational schools). By its supporters, the unification of the differentiated, selective systems of secondary education in post-war Europe represented a major step towards a fairer and less class-based education system.
Although European centre-left parties have been key supporters of comprehensive schooling, since the 1980s/1990s the policy became increasingly challenged, even partly on the left. Many centre-left parties have also started to endorse market mechanisms in education, such as parental choice or competition between schools, which challenge the comprehensive principle (Ball 2008; Blossing et al. 2014).
However, there is considerable variation in policy approaches among those parties. This research studies two cases, those of England and Austria, in order to explore the substantial divergence in the development of party policy agendas. In England, the Labour Party had been moderately successful in pushing for the introduction of comprehensive schooling in the 1960s. Since the early 1990s the party’s support for this policy waned however and in its attempt to modernise the education system the party became one of the pioneering centre-left parties espousing educational marketization (Ball 2008; Lawton 2004). The Austrian Social Democratic Party by contrast remains supportive of comprehensive schooling, despite or because it has never managed to introduce it (Glowka 1975; Engelbrecht 2014). The interviews showed however that the party has seen many internal debates of how to actually fit this demand within its overall modernisation strategy in light of the PISA-debate.
The research questions this paper will address are:
- How have centre-left parties interpreted the policy of comprehensive schooling and how has this changed since the 1980s?
- Why do we see divergences over time?
European centre-left parties have experienced important changes in their voter base as well as in their ideological profile, including changing assumptions on the means and goals of public intervention and the interpretation of ‘equality/equity’ as a goal for public policy (Meyer, Rutherford 2012). Changes in the interpretation of priorities and goals in education policy is therefore likely. However, there is considerable difference between parties concerning their adaptation to changing economic, political and discursive contexts.
Rather than seeing political parties as rationally behaving vote- and office-seeking actors whose policy preferences can be deduced from the characteristics of their voters and the political system (Ansell 2010), this study takes a more social constructivist perspective. The analysis is therefore more open to the role of ideas stemming from an increasingly powerful international education discourse but also to beliefs and values ingrained in national political and educational traditions (Ringer 2000). The aim of this study is therefore to empirically analyse the formation of party preferences and agendas – or processes of ‘collective sense-making’ and constructing shared meanings (Boyce 1995; Hajer, Laws 2006) – and thereby generating insights into the interplay of institutionalist and ideational factors.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ansell, Ben W. (2010): From the ballot to the blackboard. The redistributive political economy of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ball, Stephen J. (2008): The education debate. Bristol: Policy Press. Blossing, Ulf; Imsen, Gunn; Moos, Lejf (Eds.) (2014): The Nordic Education Model. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Boyce, Mary E. (1995): Collective Centring and Collective Sense-making in the Stories and Storytelling of One Organization. In Organization Studies 16 (1), pp. 107–137. Engelbrecht, Helmut (2014): Unendlicher Streit durch Jahrhunderte. Vereinheitlichung oder Differenzierung in der Organisation österreichischer Schulen. Wien: New Academic Press. Glowka, Detlef (1975): Schulreform und Gesellschaft in Österreich 1947-1972. In Saul B. Robinsohn et al. (Eds.): Schulreform im gesellschaftlichen Prozeß. Stuttgart: Klett, pp. 303–423. Hajer, Maarten; Laws, David (2006): Ordering through discourse. In Michael Moran, Martin Rein, Robert E. Goodin (Eds.): The Oxford handbook of public policy. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Husén, Torsten; Tuijnman, Albert; Halls, W. D. (1992): Schooling in modern European society. A report of the Academia Europaea. Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press. Lawton, Denis (2004): Education and Labour Party ideologies, 1900-2001 and beyond. London, New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Meyer, Henning; Rutherford, Jonathan (2012): The future of European social democracy. Building the good society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ringer, Fritz K. (2000): Toward a social history of knowledge. Collected essays. New York: Berghahn Books. Wiborg, Susanne (2009): Education and social integration. Comprehensive schooling in Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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