Education reform in the twenty-first century: declining emphases in international organisation reports, 1998–2018

ABSTRACT

The liberal and neoliberal world order is increasingly under attack. Global levels of democracy have been declining for over a decade, accompanied by rollbacks in some kinds of rights. We examine the implications of increasing criticisms of the (neo)-liberal era over time for educational reform discourse around the world by drawing on a unique primary dataset of 473 reports produced by international organisations between 1998 and 2018. Extending insights from neo-institutional theories of organisations, we argue that globalised models of education reform is on a decline as a result of growing attacks on the (neo)-liberal cultural system that has affected education policies around the world. Empirically, we find no evidence that reform emphases continue to grow since the 1990s, and support for arguments that predict stagnant or falling levels of reform discourse.

Acknowledgement

We wish to thank Minju Choi and Laura Talpey for outstanding research assistance. We appreciate feedback on early versions of this paper from audiences at Comparative and International Education Society, members of the Comparative Sociology Workshop at Stanford Graduate School of Education, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and members of the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen. We are particularly grateful to John Meyer for comments on an early draft. Support for this project comes from Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Stanford Global Development and Poverty Initiative, and Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a range of cases, see the studies in Cookson (1992); on liberal democracies, see Ball (1994) or Davies and Guppy (1997).

2 The Google Books Ngram Corpus is an online corpus comprised of over eight million books published across five centuries; it is the largest digital collection of books available for identifying general linguistic and cultural trends over time (see Google 2020; Lin et al. 2012).

3 It is beyond the scope of our purposes here to give a more complete explanation for the rise of liberal and neoliberal culture, and the causes of increasing attacks, and others have provided excellent accounts: for the rise of neoliberal world culture see Lechner and Boli (2008); for the reasons behind recent pushback see, e.g., Diamond, Plattner, and Rice (2015); Guillén (2018); Norris and Inglehart (2019).

4 As others have noted, the ‘universalistic’ nature of these ideologies describes the philosophical content and not their actual distribution worldwide. For example, education is assumed to be a universal human right in global institutional models (in policy, if not in practice), rather than a right that should only be extended to some countries or to some segments of the population (Furuta 2020). These models are rooted in Western conceptions of justice and progress, and advanced around the world through international governmental and non-governmental organisations (e.g., Meyer et al. 1997).

5 In addition to the four report types included in this study, we initially had collected Project Appraisal Documents (PADs) produced by the World Bank. But in the final study, we opted to exclude these because our pilot study revealed these are often more specific initiatives rather than the systemic policy reforms of interest here (Author). We also opted to exclude OECD Education at a Glance Country Notes following the results of our pilot study because these short notes mainly report tables of education statistics related to the structure, financings, and performance of education systems and include few if any specific references to policy reforms.