Handbook of Education Policy Studies

Front matter

Guorui Fan Thomas S. Popkewitz Editors

Handbook of

Education Policy Studies

Contents

PartI Values, Quality, and Education Policy

1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Iveta Silova, Jeremy Rappleye, and Euan Auld

2 Education Policy: Development and Enactment—The Case of Mima Capital. .2.65460caini cans veas See a TEEN Ee 31 Leslie A. Bell

Part II Education Policy and Reform 5 Education Reform Phenomenon: A Typology Yin Cheong Cheng

Guorui Fan

7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social Change in Recent Magdalena Jiménez-Ramírez, Antonio Luzón, Miguel A. Pereyra, and Mónica Torres xxvi Contents

Part II Government, and Education Governance

8 Retrospect and Prospect: Overview of 30 Years Kaisheng Lao

9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation at the Ministry of Education in Israel .. . Julia Resnik

10 Governmentality: The Notion of Progress in the Brazilian Political Marcia Aparecida Amador Mascia

11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Hua Wu and Xi Wang

12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development of Educational Policies for Early Jieqiong Fan and Lin Li

PartIV Globalisation, Education and Policy Reforms

Joseph Zajda

Sotiria Grek

15 Is Cultural Localization Education Necessary in Epoch of Globalization? An Analysis of the Nature of State Sovereignty . . . Tien-Hui Chiang

Part V Methodology of Education Policy Studies 16 The Politics of Metrics in Education: A Contribution

Romuald Normand

17 An Anthropological Approach to Education Policy as a Practice Bradley A. Levinson, Teresa Winstead, and Margaret Sutton

Thomas S. Popkewitz and Sverker Lindblad

19 Evidence-Informed Policy and Practice in a ‘Post-truth’ Society . .. Geoff Whitty and Emma Wisby

Contributors

Euan Auld The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Leslie A. Bell University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

David C. Berliner Arizona State University-Tempe, Tempe, AZ, USA

Luis Miguel Carvalho Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

Yin Cheong Cheng The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China Tien-Hui Chiang Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China

Inés Dussel National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City, Mexico

Guorui Fan East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Jieqiong Fan Department of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Daniel S. Friedrich Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Sotiria Grek School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Erica Rosenfeld Halverson University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Richard Halverson University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA Magdalena Jiménez-Ramirez University of Granada, Granada, Spain Kathryn L. Kirchgasler University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

John Benedicto Krejsler Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Kaisheng Lao Capital Normal University, Beijing, China xxvii xxviii Contributors

Bradley A. Levinson Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Lin Li Department of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Sverker Lindblad Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Antonio Luzón University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Márcia Aparecida Amador Mascia Universidade São Francisco, Itatiba, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Romuald Normand Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

Jennifer T. Ozga Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Miguel A. Pereyra University of Granada, Granada, Spain Daniel Pettersson University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden

Thomas S. Popkewitz Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Congman Rao Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China Jeremy Rappleye Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Julia Resnik School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

Masako Shibata University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

Iveta Silova Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University-Tempe, Tempe, AZ, USA

Kyunghee So Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea Yifan Sui Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Margaret Sutton Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Chia-Wei Tang National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, China Mónica Torres University of Granada, Granada, Spain Ryoko Tsuneyoshi University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Xi Wang Department of Education, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

Geoff Whitty Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK

Contributors XXiX

Teresa Winstead Department of Society and Social Justice, Saint Martin’s University-Lacey, Lacey, WA, USA

Emma Wisby Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK Cheng-Ta Wu National Chengchi University, Taipei City, Taiwan, China

Hua Wu Department of Education, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

Zhihui Wu Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China

Wenjie Yang Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China Wensen Yu Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China

Zhenguo Yuan East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Joseph Zajda Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University, Melboune, VIC, Australia

Lin Zhang East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Part I Values, Quality, and Education Policy

Chapter 1 A) Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking gss Education, Values, and Policy Transfer

Iveta Silova, Jeremy Rappleye, and Euan Auld

Over the past four decades, the dominant understanding of education policy has shifted dramatically. In the past, education policy was seen as a reflection of particular historical, political, social, economic, and cultural configurations of a given country. Today, policy is increasingly understood as heavily influenced by extra-national forces, so much so that policies “elsewhere” are seen as possible reform options. This has given rise to many dominant trends in education policy today: the OECD’s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA), the discourses of “best practice,” the dominance of the World Bank in the “developing” world, and now even attempts to borrow from “high performing” countries to improve education policy and practice at home. Examples include the United Kingdom’s well-publicized attempts to borrow Shanghai Math, American ongoing efforts to import Japanese Lesson Study, and an increasing interest among policymakers globally to transfer an illusive “Finnish PISA miracle” into different education contexts.

Yet, this perspective is not new. All modern education systems arose relationally, be it through purposeful learning from systems elsewhere or by forceful implant by colonizing powers. Notable examples of the former include American interest in the Prussian system (Horace Mann), Japanese study of the American system (Iwakura Mission), and China’s import of the Japanese system (Qing Imperial Court Mission 1896). The latter include British education in India (Macaulay) and Hong Kong, the

I. Silova (%4) Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: Iveta.Silova@asu.edu

J. Rappleye Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

E. Auld The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

© The Author(s) 2020 3 G. Fan, T. S. Popkewitz (eds.), Handbook of Education Policy Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-98 1-13-8347-2_1

United States in the Philippines and Hawaii, and Japan in Korea and Taiwan. Viewed against this larger historical span, the recent shift to an extra-national perspective for policy studies is not a novel development, but a return to the recognition that modern education and education policy are inevitably entangled with the world beyond one’s own national borders.

Where difference does arise is in the levels of recognition of global entanglement. Arguably most non-Western countries cannot even imagine education or education policy without reference to the Western world: the legacy of Western colonization remains too powerful, Western-led development ensures constant comparison, or the analytical frameworks that are used to understand education remain imbued with the Western experience. In these contexts—the majority in the world— education policy inevitably and automatically invokes comparison and contextualization in the wider world. In contrast, most Western countries still lack recognition of education policy as relational and globally entangled. Having never experienced colonization (i.e., the receiving end) and viewing their analytical frameworks as universal rather than particular, these countries—the minority in the world—are only now coming to recognize the comparative, global dimensions of education. That is, although Western observers are apt to view global policy trends over the past several decades as novel, in fact they are only experiencing what non-Western countries have encountered since the beginning of modern education: the inevitability of thinking about education in relation to the wider global context.

One consequence of the fateful combination of Western academic dominance and Western amnesia regarding relationality is that the analytical frameworks utilized in understanding education policy tend to lack a global dimension. As we detail below, the one area of research that retained this extra-national dimension was studies of educational transfer, also called “borrowing” and “lending” (Steiner- Khamsi and Waldow 2012; Steiner-Khamsi 2004). Yet, even within studies of educational transfer, the analytical frameworks somehow developed with little serious discussion of wider global significance, resulting in a set of easy conceptual tropes: academic/applied, real/imagined, global/local, etc. (for critique, see Silova and Rappleye 2015). While this work remains important, our aim in this chapter is to go beyond the usual ways of viewing education policy and, in particular, the theme of educational transfer within it: we argue that this growing body of work needs to be (re)contextualized within the larger questions of global significance. Inescapably, this requires that we as researchers think seriously about the values that underpin our scholarship and reflect on what sort of global futures our work seeks to contribute to.

1.2 Limits of Current Approaches

America in the 1950s witnessed a coincidence that gave rise to a global contradiction in education policy studies. Parson’s structural functionalism was then dominant in the social sciences. Functionalism held that institutions, including education,

1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 5 changed in relation to the particular historical, social, economic, and cultural configurations within a given country. At the same time, America strived for global expansion of its models and, in the context of the Cold War, began to actively promote these ideas worldwide in the form of Modernization Theory as an alternative to Marxism (e.g., Rostow 1971; see also Rappleye 2018). There was a deep confidence that America was leading a universal global trajectory toward a prosperous and peaceful future. The deep contradiction was that education was understood analytically in narrow domestic terms, while change was clearly coming from the outside in the form of Western-led development agencies such as USAID, UNESCO, and the World Bank, in addition to the persisting legacies of Western colonialism (we are apt to forget that dozens of Western colonies existed even as late as the mid-1950s). Western bureaucrats and colonial administrators, joined by like-minded academics and local collaborators, set to the task of finding out how to make functionally efficient education policy to “move” countries toward a future imagined in the image of the West.

This policymaking “logic” only intensified in subsequent decades, particularly after the collapse of the socialist bloc wherein Western solutions enjoyed virtually free reign, reaching a point where education policy studies came to be almost entirely focused on locating narrow “solutions” to predetermined images of “progress.” The most obvious examples today are found within OECD and World Bank led projects seeking to gather immense amounts of data and apply the most advanced statistical techniques in analysis to isolate “what works” in raising students’ achievement (Auld and Morris 2016). Even initiatives such as Education for All (EFA), the Millennium Development Goals (MGDs), and more recently the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reveal a similar focus on minute technical issues without serious discussion of the larger direction and future course (e.g., how to measure progress toward SDG 4, rather than on clarifying what the key term “sustainability” might mean). And while it is easy for critical scholars to disparage these attempts as naïve, in fact the field of education policy studies remains overwhelmingly tied to the functionalist research agenda: it seeks to “fix” education with norms anchored in an unexamined faith in the Western future.

Running counter to these trends within the broader field of education policy studies is research on policy transfer. It has long refused the functionalist fantasy that education can be understood in domestic terms alone. It remains focused on the movement of policies across borders and cognizant of global entanglements. Theoretical frameworks utilized in this area such as World Culture Theory and World Systems Theory actively champion a move beyond functionalism. In this sense, the policy transfer research is leading the way, at least in Western contexts, out of the provincialism bequeathed by functionalism.

Nevertheless, we would argue that educational transfer research still remains too limited, too unaware of the narrowness of its implicit assumptions to affect deep change in the way we understand education policy. Concretely, policy transfer research has too often fallen back on a simple distinction between academic and applied research, attempting to define itself against functionalism. In contrast to applied researchers, academic transfer scholars purport to deal “objectively” with how transfer occurs, what stages occur in the process, what actors are involved, and what larger social forces are in play (Phillips 2006). This purported objectivity is seen as superior to the normatively laden work of applied researchers, those who seek to intervene in the “real world.”

Among this group of “academic researchers,” another set of dichotomous distinctions has subsequently arisen, those focused on “global” developments (e.g., work in International Organizations and apex of policymaking) and “local” understandings (e.g., how policy is translated into practice, reinterpreted along the way, or morphs-as-it-moves). This global/local conceptualization has been one of the most defining categories of analysis over the past two decades, often reinforcing previous dichotomies such as West/East and North/South (Larsen and Beech 2014; Takayama 2015; Silova 2012). Some researchers even make a further distinction between what is “real” and “imagined” in the process, pointing out how adoption of global discourses alone does not represent authentic borrowing (Steiner-Khamsi 2004). Despite critiques that such dichotomies have become a cul-de-sac for our research imagination (Silova and Rappleye 2015; Silova et al. 2017), they persist.

As such, these conceptual tools, although once useful in bringing more nuance and clarity to understanding borrowing and lending processes, have not only become tropes in their repeated use over the past two decades, but they also continue to obscure the larger questions of global significance. In the push to become more “objective” than naive functionalist accounts, research on policy transfer somewhere along the way lost the larger plot. Why are analyses of policy transfer important? What larger project does this body of work contribute to? What sort of future can we imagine from such studies? Although education transfer research escaped the narrowness of functionalism, it never attempted to subsequently contemplate the wider worldview that bestows its work with significance. That is, it has increased in complexity but has largely failed to address its underlying provincialism.

1.2.1 A New Framework for Education Policy Borrowing

Can we continue policy transfer research but jettison its underlying Western provincialism, and what would such a project entail? Utilizing the work of Mignolo (2011), we address these questions by presenting a new framework for understanding the nature of education policy studies, comprising five main research trajectories that are shaping global futures. Mignolo (2011) describes five co-existing but competing projects: (1) re-westernization, (2) global reorientation to the left, (3) de-westernization, (4) decoloniality, and (5) spirituality. Figure 1.1 juxtaposes these options turned possible global futures.

Here we are in agreement with Mignolo (2011) who argues that “in the forthcoming decades, the world order will be decided in the struggles, negotiations, competitions, andcollaborations between fivedifferentandcoexistingtrajectories—without a winner” (p. 33). Our primary goal in this chapter is not to advocate for one specific position or perspective, but instead to call attention to the plurality of projects

1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 7 unfolding in our contemporary world. If policy transfer research can be successfully repositioned on this larger and more diverse world-historical map—what Cowen (1996) usefully calls “kosmos” but now needs to be rendered in the plural—we believe research will become more dynamic and debates far richer. Moreover, we as researchers will be forced to think through and clarify our own values. Below we first briefly describe the five trajectories, then in the next section demonstrate what transfer research based on each of these trajectories might look like.

Rewesternization entails the retrenchment and further expansion of the Western liberal model. Most recognizable in the guise of neoliberal policy, the pillars of this project are “saving capitalism,” resuscitated, reloaded, and revamped through science and technology. Mignolo (2011) highlights the leading role of the United States in advancing this primarily economic project, pointing specifically to the knowledge dimension: “ ‘Knowledge for Development’ is the unquestioned orientation of the United States in its current project of rewesternizing the world, which is also transparent in the initiation of the World University Forum, in Davos” (p. 36). Mignolo also draws attention to how subjectivity becomes rewritten within this trajectory away from “communal and pluriversal futures” and toward subjectivities of consumerism and, we would add, individualism.

Reorientation to the Left signifies challenges to rewesternization. One half of this project continues existing trajectories of Western thought from within the Western sphere: secularism and ambitions for universality (e.g., Marxism). It continues the hope of, for example, retaking “the commons” from the increased domination of the capitalist logic or reworking existing institutions to foster greater material equality. The other half of this project pursues similar ends but is situated outside of Western Europe: “the Left from a Marxist background, as was introduced and unfolded in colonial countries and subcontinents” (p. 41). Mignolo (2011) argues that scholars

Roiate Knowledge Western Non-Western Knowledge Economy Subjec ie Subjectivity Reorientation Reorientation Subjectivity Knowledge (Objectivity ee Authority of the Left of the Left Authority Subjectivity without En Economy (Objectivity (Objectivity Economy (Objectivity in Parentheses) E) (Objectivity without without without (Objectivityin Parentheses) Parentheses) Parentheses) Parentheses) Parentheses) R z 2 Spiritual/ see ane Reorientation Decolonial = Dewesternization Rewesternization of the Left O Ontological Options Mediation Mediation Mediation Mediation Mediation Actors/Institution Actors/Institution Actors/Institution Actors/Institution — Actors/Institution

Fig. 1.1 Schematic visualization of five current trajectories of the world order that are shaping global futures. (Source: Adapted from Mignolo 2011: 35)

working from this perspective face similar challenges as in the West and therefore “must consider to what extent Western political theories and political economy and Western universities (as institutions and curricula) shall be the model for socioeconomic organization and education” (p. 44).

Dewesternization initially appears like a clean break from the Western frameworks of the first two options, but in fact retains and seeks to perfect one half of it: a universally dominant economic trajectory (capitalism). The proposed break comes instead with Western epistemology and the means through which it is projected: “While dewesternization shares with rewesternization the ‘survival of capitalism,’ the confrontation takes place at other levels of the colonial matrix of power: the sphere of authority, of knowledge, and of subjectivity” (p. 47). Mignolo highlights China as exemplar of this position: China increasingly rejects Washington’s dictates as it grows more confident with its global leadership role, yet the politically driven resuscitation of Confucianism is, Mignolo asserts, largely a means of accelerating the move toward China taking control of the locus of global authority. That is, China seeks not to change the structure and hierarchy of a global order created by Western powers and epistemologies, but simply assert control of it.

The Decolonial Option signifies the attempt to divest from forms of Western knowledge imposed during the course of colonialism. The key term here is “delinking,” signifying an unhitching from Western economic forms and political authority, but particularly epistemic and subjective starting points. A crucial feature of decoloniality is that “objectivity is in parentheses” which means the end of epistemic universality; the end of the very idea that there exists an “ultimate blueprint for the future” (p. 52). Instead, the decolonial trajectory “means both the analytic task of unveiling the logic of coloniality and the prospective task of contributing to building a world in which many worlds exist” (p. 54). Central to this project is the presence of the Other—an entity that does not share the same basic self-understanding, a challenge that simultaneously defamiliarizes one’s own frameworks and suggests alternatives.

Last, the Spiritual Option is an attempt to decolonize at an even deeper level, centered on the triad of knowledge, subjectivity, and religion. Utilizing the word “spirituality”—a term we ourselves feel hesitant about and feel is better read as the Ontological Option, as discussed below—Mignolo recognizes that the modernist assumption of secularism continues to operate within decolonial discussions. As such, it is necessary to “decolonize religion to liberate spirituality” (p. 62). Lest this be understood as a mere dropping out from the larger materialism plot and universe of responsibility, Mignolo recognizes that rethinking the spiritual foundations is crucial for the general direction of delinking from Western modernity: “the common ground for all these re-inscriptions of spirituality is the desire to find ways of life beyond capitalism and its magic of modernity and development that keeps consumers caught in the promises of dreamworlds” (p. 62). More constructively still, what the spiritual option offers is “the contribution of opening up horizons of life that have been kept hostage (that is, colonized) by modernity, capitalism, and the belief in the superiority of Western civilization” (ibid).

1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 9

Based on this brief summary of Mignolo’s (2011) pluriversal global futures, we now turn to (re)classify empirical studies of educational transfer according to their implicit commitments to one or more of these trajectories. Importantly, we assume that anyone, thinking and writing from anywhere, can participate in any of these projects. That is, the decolonial option is not reserved for scholars in former colonies but can be undertaken from anywhere. Meanwhile, the rewesternization project can be undertaken in both Pondicherry and Paris, and Wuhan and Washington. Mignolo writes: “There is no one-to-one relation between actors and trajectories, although actors make their options at the intersections of their biography, their desires, and the available option” (p. 69). This underscores a key point. As educational policy scholars, we are responsible for reading the wider kosmos and understanding where our work fits. Our work—educational policy transfer research—is itself a form of decision-making about the future, one Mignolo calls mediation: “Disputes for knowledge are fought at the level of mediations. For it is in knowledgemaking and argument-building that decisions take place” (p. 67). We submit that educational researchers can no longer escape this decision-making about the global future by retreating to the easy tropes of research to date, unhitched from a wider global plot.

1.3 Toward Multiple Global Trajectories: Agenda for Education Policy Research

In what follows we discuss each trajectory toward global futures separately with a focus on education policy transfer research, while keeping in mind that these trajectories are not fully divergent and may overlap in various ways.

1.3.1 Rewesternization

Stemming from the historical foundations of Western civilization and the accompanying spread of Christianity and colonialism, the project of rewesternization attempts to maintain the global hegemony of the West by protecting and extending privileges acquired over the past 500 years (Mignolo 2011). While overt colonization is no longer politically viable, the project of rewesternization nevertheless continues the Western civilizing mission through new political, economic, social, and racial reconfigurations, ranging from modernization and international development efforts to humanitarianism and anti-terrorism campaigns. At its core, rewesternization is about securing the global future for capitalism, market economy, and democracy, as well as the philosophical tenets of liberalism that underpin it. It attempts to rebuild, or prop up, a flagging global confidence in the leadership of the United States and Western Europe.

Whereas global economic policy discussions have focused on the goal of “saving capitalism,” or “reimagining” its future, especially since the global financial crisis of 2008 (Mignolo 2011), rewesternization efforts in education have translated into the global policies that promote the idea of “knowledge for development,’ or, more specifically, knowledge for economic development and growth. As resources become increasingly limited, both in physical and political terms, it is clear that “the control of scientific and technological knowledge is the card the West shall [continue to] play” in an attempt to maintain its global competitiveness and control (Mignolo 2011: 49). In fact, the World Bank’s World Development Report (1998) spelled this out in utmost clarity over two decades ago: “knowledge, not capital, is the key to sustained economic growth and improvements in human well-being.” In another iteration, the seminal report Constructing Knowledge Societies (World Bank 2002) maintained that “social and economic progress is achieved primarily through the advancement and application of knowledge” (p. xix) (see Rappleye and Un 2018).

Underpinning the idea of “knowledge for development” is a set of assumptions associated with the concept of “neoliberalism,” postulating that markets should play a fundamental role in determining educational purposes, priorities, and policies. Rather than viewing education as a public good, the neoliberal education reform agenda has redefined education to serve private interests, restricting its purposes to the pursuit of increased individual productivity and economic growth (for critique see Ball 2007, 2012; Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Morris 2016). The agenda is being driven by many powerful actors, including corporations (such as Pearson), international financial institutions (such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund), European Union (EU), the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as a network of private sector coalitions (such as including Hewlett and Gates Foundations).

The substance to this neoliberal rewesternization agenda is provided by comparative policy studies (often commissioned by the World Bank and OECD), which claim that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA (i.e., an increase in “knowledge” defined as “twenty-first century skills”) automatically lead to higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates (see Hanushek and Kimko 2000; Hanushek and Woessmann 2007, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016). The World Bank’s work is duly based on the premise that “education builds human capital, which translates into economic growth” (World Bank 2018: 41). Similarly, the OECD has propelled the neoliberal agenda through its many publications—such as Employment and Growth in the Knowledge-Based Economy (Foray and Lundvall 1996) or The Knowledge Economy (1996)—as well as using its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to promote a link between education and economic growth. Both the World Bank’s SABER and the OECD’s Education at a Glance series are subsequently presented as a guide to the “correct” reading of the datasets, collating information on participating societies to provide a source for identifying “best practices” and initiating transfer.

Meanwhile, education policy entrepreneurs, experts, and consultants have stepped up as intermediaries to “translate” PISA data into “best practices,” promot-

1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 11 ing—and profiting from—the uptake of neoliberal reforms globally (Auld and Morris 2014; Verger 2012; Silova 2012). This industry will be further extended and legitimated under the OECD’s (2018) Learning Framework 2030, which is aligned with the UN’s post-2015 goals as part of the organization’s vision for a “new paradigm for development.” The “new” vision uses universal metrics to set nations on an “improvement journey”, on which they will be supported by a global policy network and partnerships with private organizations. It should be noted that this trajectory is not somehow located “outside” the field: the underlying logic is often casually replicated in academic settings, both in consultancy projects oriented toward influencing policy and in research studies developed for an academic readership. The combination of this network of academics, consultants, and international agencies has thus contributed to both scientific legitimation and practical implementation of the rewesternization project itself.

While the World Bank, OECD, and other international agencies continue to pursue the rewesternization project and the neoliberal education agenda associated with it, many education researchers and policymakers worldwide have become increasingly critical. In particular, they have challenged this “new” policy regime for imposing Western-centric lens to understand education across different contexts (Silova 2012), for introducing market principles into public education settings (Verger and Moschetti 2016; Verger 2012; Robertson et al. 2012), for converting education complexity into (Western) “best practices” (Auld and Morris 2016), for insisting on standardization that destroys diverse onto-cultural ecologies (Gorur 2016), for deepening socioeconomic and gender inequities (Stromquist 2016; Unterhalter 2017), or for overlooking other policy alternatives (Edwards and Loucel 2016; Silova 2010).

More importantly, recent studies have cast doubt on the whole validity of the alleged causal relationship between student test scores and economic growth—the bedrock of the rewesternization project today. They argue that the relationship between changes in student test scores and economic growth in subsequent periods is “unclear at best, doubtful at worst” (Komatsu and Rappleye 2017: 170). Broadly speaking, this means that the policy logic underpinning the rewesternization education regime is not only ethically, pedagogically, economically, and politically problematic, but it is also empirically flawed. Such research should be approached with caution by policymakers and researchers who find themselves under pressure to introduce education policy reforms recommended by international financial institutions in the name of economic growth and, by extension, participate in the project of rewesternization.

1.3.2 Reorientation to the Left

One of the strongest critiques thus far of the rewesternization project has come from a competing global trajectory—“reorientation of the Left’—which encompasses different leftist orientations seeking visions of alternative non-capitalist futures.

Following Mignolo (2011), these orientations include the secular Marxist Left, the Global Left that emerged in the World Social Forum (WSF) as a response to the foundation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as “modern/colonial Left” that has unfolded in former colonial settings (South America, Caribbean, the Middle East, etc.). Underpinning the theoretical foundations of these different leftist orientations are dependency theory and world-system analysis that aim to explain “the differential power of nation states located hierarchically within the worldeconomy” in the face of the unequal distribution of wealth, resources, and well-being (Griffith and Arnove 2015: 95; see also Clayton 1998 and Wallerstein 1983, 1995). In this context, the “re-orientation of the Left” project seeks to engage in developing “educational policies and practices that can help to create more peaceful, just and democratic futures” (Griffith and Arnove 2015: 90).

In the comparative study of education policy transfer, the “re-orientation of the Left” is visible in the empirical studies directly critiquing the rewesternization project and mapping alternative education trajectories of the Global Left. Such a twoprong approach enables researchers and policy makers to transform a “language of critique” into a “language of possibility” (Giroux 1997: 108). In particular, a sustained critique of the unequal power dynamics inherent in the North-South education transfer has led many researchers to investigate a South-South cooperation and grassroots mobilization as possible ways to build more symmetrical relationships between the lenders and borrowers of education policies and practices (see Chisholm and Steiner-Khamsi 2008; Jules and Morais de sá e Silva 2008; de sa e Silva 2009). In the context of international development, South-South transfer has been conceptualized as “a way out of the dependency trap in educational development,” offering new forms of collective mobilization to overcome global inequalities (Steiner- Khamsi 2009: 242).