Theoretical notes on the sociological analysis of school reform networks

Abstract

Nearly two decades ago, Ladwig outlined the theoretical and methodological implications of Bourdieu’s concept of the social field for sociological analyses of educational policy and school reform. The current analysis extends this work to consider the sociological import of one of the most ubiquitous forms of educational reform found around the planet: school reform networks. On the one hand, this analysis highlights the extent to which schooling is composed of multiple, co-existing social fields, which offer school reform networks ample leverage points for change. On the other hand, the degree to which reform networks hope to realise their ambitions fundamentally depends on their capacity to leverage the transferability of capitals among those social fields that govern the daily practices of schooling.

Keywords:

• social field
• school reform
• reform networks
• Bourdieu
• educational policy
• sociological theory

Notes

1. Some readers will want to dispute this claim by pointing out the relative success of the leading nations in international comparisons, most notably the overall performance of the school systems of the Asian Tiger economies and Finland. I would point out that none of these have really demonstrated great equitable results if you merely scratch below the surface (let us not forget the Sami people and the internal racisms of Asia), and that all of these systems have not really been reformed but built anew into their current forms.

2. Advocacy of networks as a lever of school reform is common, to the point of finding some systems proclaiming official success from them (Watterston and Caldwell 2011); however, advocacy of vision does not equal improved outcome (Robinson 2008).

3. A good sense of this pattern can be gleaned from the relatively recent Handbook of Educational Policy Research (Sykes, Schneider, and Plank 2009).

4. The hierarchically nested nature of these systems has been the object of analysis in, and reason for, multi-level statistical models in the social science, known in North American circles as hierarchical linear modelling (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002), and in the United Kingdom and Europe as multi-level modelling (Goldstein 2003).

5. For clarity it is probably wise to point out that this variant of new institutionalism is not the same as that developed in neo-classical economics’ ‘new institutionalism’, which is associated with the work of Douglass North, and conceptions of rationalism within market development.

6. The notion of de-coupling deployed by Meyer and his colleagues was built from Weick’s original conception of loosely coupled systems (Weick 1976).

7. Consider Foucault’s comments on the role of schools in the historical development of governmentality: ‘To put it in more concrete terms, we can obviously describe a given society’s school apparatus or its set of educational apparatuses, but I think that we can analyze them effectively only if we do not see them as an overall unity, only if we do not try to derive them from something like the Statist unity of sovereignty. We can analyze them only if we try to see how they interact, how they support one another, and how this apparatus defines a certain number of global strategies on the basis of multiple subjugations (of child to adult, progeny to parents, ignorance to knowledge, apprentice to master, family to administration, and so on). All these mechanisms and operators of domination are the actual plinth of the global apparatus that is the school apparatus. So, if you like, we have to see the structures of power as global strategies that traverse and use local tactics of domination’ (Foucault 2003, 45–46).

8. Studies into multiple subjectivities and cultural hybridity (and language dispersion) have made clear that humans are never fully interpolated by structures (at least not yet, as far as we know).

9. This insight was already part and parcel of research into school restructuring in the early 1990s (Ladwig and King 1992).

10. Note that this observation and hypothesis inverts typical characterisation of where power lies in schooling. We often understate the power of teachers and misrecognise the power, productivity (and good sense) of teachers’ choices to not take up reforms.

11. Herein lies the fertile ground of studies into the micro-politics of schools first noted by Ball (1987), and more recently picked up in relation to educational leadership in North America (see, for example, Coburn 2006).

12. The number of possible fields would be the number of possible sub-sets for any given population of people; that is, in set theory, the power set minus the number of individuals and the null set. Luckily, however, as Jerome Bruner once noted: ‘The most characteristic and indeed defining thing about human behaviour, or any behaviour, is that it is virtually never random’ (Bruner 1979, 131).

13. Of course, to accept commonsense is risky business, especially when we presume student outcomes are actually outcomes of school (Ladwig 2010). There are many forms of student outcomes that we could consider, each with consequences for analyses of which fields contribute to a given outcome. In perhaps the broadest terms, the basic forms of population governance created through schooling are the most macro of capitals created through schooling, as what Foucault calls the second consequence of liberalism (Foucault 2008, 67).

14. Much can be said simply with the concepts of capitals and decoupling, leading to a recognition of radical system transformation (Hargreaves 2011).

15. Obvious examples here include systems that proclaim value in distributive leadership but simultaneously place a single school leader in the position of legislative authority and responsibility, or apparent contradictions between the official and hidden curriculum.

16. This observation raises the question of the relationship between individual mobility and system stability – wherein it is plausible that mobility among teachers buttresses the power of school leaders (and so on, up the hierarchy). The often noted ‘ministerialisation’ of education in Westminster systems, wherein chief bureaucrats are appointed directly by politicians (and just as quickly moved on), is a nice way of maintaining the idea that it is legitimate for politicians to govern schools, and the associated belief that ideological based voting results actually do serve the collective interest.

17. In this light, the growing analyses of and calls for systemic alignment can be seen as the predictable counterpart to de-coupling (see, for example, (Hargreaves 2011; King and Bouchard 2011; Watterston and Caldwell 2011).

18. This perspective allows us to understand the functioning of schools within a broader sociology of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), bringing the sociology of education back to its historical origins in moral philosophy (Bourdieu 1991).