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ABSTRACT
This article aims to show the value of the concept of policy trajectory to compare, from a long-term perspective, the transformations of education policies in the context of globalisation. After discussing the scope and limitations of the analyses of the concept in the literature – descriptive, sequential, metaphorical and building on the works of Stephen Ball –, we propose, our own conceptualisation. This regards policy trajectory as a double shift in time and space and understood as the result of different processes of path dependency, translation and bricolage. The forms of this trajectory depend on the educational orders at work at different levels of school systems, and not only at the global level. To illustrate this approach, we draw on a study which compared performance-based accountability policies in France and Quebec. Despite some challenges, this approach has the merit of proposing a fruitful theoretical framework for studying and comparing policy implementation.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In this article, we refer to educational or institutional orders as more or less stable institutional balances in the social relations between educational actors. These orders are based on specific constitutive properties that determine the values, roles, practices and representations of the actors. They produce rules and they frame individuals’ possibilities of action and negotiation. Such an approach does not mean that there is only one educational order in a social system, but that several are in tension.
2 The (New)AGE (‘(New) Accountability and Governance in Education’) project was supported by the French national research agency, ANR, and by the research institute for society and culture of Quebec, FQRSC, and it compared performance-based accountability policies in France and Quebec. These policies were regarded as most similar cases of education policy globalisation whose possible disconfirmation may be instructive when studying least similar country-contexts. Our strategy consisted in choosing a policy – accountability policy – which can be seen as a typical example of an education policy promoted by transnational organisations and showing that, even in this obvious case, variations in its implementation are not unilateral but fundamentally multi-level and dependent on the policy trajectory of each system. If these aspects were empirically proven, then it could be argued that it was also true in least likely cases. Our strategy of comparison, oriented to cases rather than variables, in terms of Ragin's well-known distinction (Citation1987), consisted in analysing deeply and intensively two country-contexts through an inductive, qualitative, comprehensive and interpretative approach, to understand the complexity of each context and highlight the dynamic links within it. The contexts were chosen because they not only allowed the most different systems comparison, but also with a view to broadening the empirical coverage of the international literature on accountability in education. The French education system is characterised by a high degree of administrative centralisation, an emphasis and reliance on ministerial circulars as a mode of interdepartmental communication and regulation, and resistance to external influence, especially that of New Public Management (NPM). By contrast, in Quebec, while the main administrative, curricular, and published pedagogical guidelines were centralised at the state level from 1960, the school boards were present at the inception of the educational initiative and have always had room for manoeuvre. And there is no such thing as resistance to transnational ‘public management’ discourse within Quebec public administration. For both country studies, we used different qualitative methods to collect appropriate data: analyses of different types of documents (official texts, institutional documents, parliamentary debates, press releases and newspaper articles), observations in schools and school administrations (when they were possible) and numerous interviews with actors at different institutional positions within the educational system. The field study was conducted in four school boards (Commissions scolaires) and four secondary schools in Quebec and, in France, in nine high schools (lycées) – six public and three private – which were located in three very different education administration districts (academies, called ‘academies’ in this article; in the French education system, academies designate state-run education authorities in charge of primary and secondary education at the regional level). The research brought to light many results. For instance, it showed that while both education systems were exposed to the requirements of transnational ideologies such as NPM and, particularly, to accountability, these requirements were translated on the basis of the specific contexts and problematisations of domestic policies and that this led to highly diversified forms of globalisation in France and in Quebec. For more methodological details, see Maroy and Pons (Citation2019, 95–113; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01285-4).
3 After completing our fieldwork, the situation changed more radically in 2018 with the advent of a new government majority led by a party favourable to the disappearance of the SBs. While maintaining and simplifying RBM tools, Bill 40 from January 2019 abolished school elections and imposed a change of name for the SBs, which became ‘School Service Centres’. Also, a SB executive director is now to be appointed by the provincial government rather than by the college of elected commissioners. This law is, however, subject to judicial recourse at the Federal level, in the name of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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Christian Maroy
Christian Maroy is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Louvain. He is also associate professor of education policies at the University of Montreal and former holder of the Canada Chair of Research on Education Policies (2010-17). As member of the research center GIRSEF (UCLouvain), his work focuses on education policies, governance and regulation of schools, and on institutional change. He edited recently (with S. Grek and A. Verger) the World Yearbook of Education 2021: Accountability and Datafication in the Governance of Education.
Xavier Pons
Xavier Pons is Professor in Education at the University of Paris Est Créteil (UPEC), researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on Transformations of Educational and Social Practices (Lirtes) and associate researcher at the Center for social change (OSC-Sciences Po). A member of several comparative research projects, his work on the sociology of policies and public problems focuses mainly on transformations of the state and modes of governance in education, reforms of school administrations, the mediatisation of educational problems and the ways in which public debate in education is structured. He is also co-editor of the Revue française de pédagogie.