Shared problems, diverging solutions: experts on the Dutch field of education

ABSTRACT

This article presents an analysis of the Dutch field of education by drawing on interviews and observations from long-lasting relationships with experts in the field. Studying how these “key players” discuss the educational field, we explore how the lack of effective solutions may be related to the ways in which leading educational experts make sense of the educational system and its ailments, as well as what they see as promising solutions. We find that experts concur on the main logics of the educational field but assess the main problems and solutions differently. Despite experts being professionally situated within the same field, their views on the biggest issues and potentially effective measures to counteract them diverge strongly. This article concludes that this lack of consistency in problem assessment of our respondents may suggest why certain flaws of the educational field are difficult to address and hence remain salient.

KEYWORDS:

• Bourdieu
• field of education
• experts
• education policy
• habitus

Introduction

Forged in struggles of class, race and religion, reformed in the post-war decades of welfare state expansion (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; De Rooy, 2018), and affected by recent decades of privatization and decentralization (Astiz et al., 2002; Karsten, 1999), educational systems in Western Europe (and beyond) are complex amalgams of egalitarian, meritocratic and neoliberal elements. Correspondingly, educational systems are potentially conducive to social mobility but prone to reproducing inequalities at the same time (Ball, 2012; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). In recent decades, many western educational systems have been struggling to deliver on their emancipatory roles. Shifts in recent decades in public policy towards marketization, privatization and decentralization have had detrimental effects on the capacity of education to deliver on social equity (Ball, 2003, 2012). For example, a broad literature shows that introducing more school choice enables both parents and schools to select advantageous student populations, contributing to greater segregation and inequality (Ball et al., 1995; Jennings, 2010; Reay & Lucey, 2004).

In recent decades, rounds of reforms have coincided with the Dutch educational system performing less well in both quality and equity, as well as being plagued by consistently high levels of school segregation (Inspectorate of Education, 2017, 2019; OECD, 2016). Despite a steady stream of academic reports and studies about the system’s ailments, there is remarkable ineffectiveness in addressing these issues (Inspectorate of Education, 2021). We suggest that, to diagnose why such inertia and ineffectiveness exist, it is necessary not only to study how the educational system produces inequality (i.e., in terms of mechanisms associated with segregation and inequality) – or the success/failure of specific policy instruments—but also to investigate how agents in the field of education—understand the field in which they operate. We hence propose to conceptualize Dutch education as a Bourdieusian field, a move which allows us to study its inner workings, logics of practice and wider connections to the field of power (cf. Lingard et al., 2005). We seek an intimate understanding of how certain powerful agents in the Dutch education field articulate their perspectives on alleged challenges and potential solutions. We aim to explore how the lack of effective interventions may be related to the way in which key experts in the educational field understand the Dutch educational system and its ailments, and what they see as solutions. The key question is: How do experts understand the main challenges and most promising solutions in the field of Dutch education?

Theoretical framework: (dis)positions of experts and the field of education

Bourdieu’s original accounts of education were centrally concerned with the relationship of the field with wider power relations in society. They argued that the educational system has consistently and stealthily worked to the advantage of the upper strata of society (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Education itself and the values it promotes reward specific social dispositions (i.e., middle- and upper-class cultural codes), legitimized and effectively hidden by an ideology of meritocracy (Young, 1958). More recent Bourdieusian analyses, however, focus more squarely on dynamics within the field (Bourdieu, 1998, 1999). From a Bourdieusian perspective, fields are always constituted by agents with certain sets of socialized dispositions that can act as power resources when they are (mis)recognized as “natural” assets valued in a given field (e.g., on habitus taking the form of cultural capital). One goal, from this perspective, is to focus on how more or less differently predisposed and positioned agents—such as teachers, headteachers, policy makers and parents—are engaged in ideological power struggles (van Zanten, 2005). Bourdieusian scholars (Ball, 2003; Lareau, 2003; Reay et al., 2010) have therefore focused not merely on policies and the more formal rules of the field but also on the symbolic practices that emerge given (1) the stakes in a field understood to be a “space of play” and (2) the “feel for the game” of the various players (i.e., habitus). The work of Rawolle, Lingard and colleagues (2005, 2008, 2015) suggests viewing the specific sets of experiences of agents in the field as a professional habitus, associated with specific logics of practice. Taylor and Singh (2005) argue that logics of practice are also differentiated between different subsections of the educational bureaucracy within which professionals or experts have accumulated their experiences.

Especially significant in terms of the dynamics of collaboration and contestation among experts in fields such as the one we examine is what Bourdieu terms “symbolic capital”. This term refers to the form of power, in our case operating in an educational field, that compels people or for example entire organizations to accept certain (dubious) claims. Here, one might consider claims such those related to links between more well-to-do parents and more “gifted” children, who “of course” tend to have access to more desirable schools. Fish, one might say, do not see water. Symbolic capital, then, is the power to categorize, define, interpret, express and “naturalize” things. From Bourdieu’s perspective, this is the power to make worlds and symbolic capital is considered most effective when otherwise profoundly controversial claims become, simply, what “everyone knows”.

Several examples of this symbolic capital are quite distinctive to the Dutch educational field. Consider, for example, how—based largely on ostensibly objective test results—tracking into vocational or comprehensive secondary educational schools and programs takes place at the age of 11/12. Such an early tracking regime can be either taken for granted or problematized, and either said to deserve, at best, cosmetic “solutions” or understood to demand genuinely powerful corrective measures. Here, we see why the discourses of educational experts occupying key positions in relevant organizations should be taken seriously as vital features of the organizational field examined here. Well aware of how (educational) elites tend to play a major role in constructing social reality (Batteson & Ball, 1995; Heimans, 2012), we conceptualize policy “as emerging from contested relations of power within institutional and social settings, and [as] therefore the product of negotiation, struggle and compromise” (Naidoo, 2004, pp. 461, 468).

Correspondingly, we follow Rawolle and Lingard (2008) in referring to a “policy habitus” that can be described as “the sets of dispositions that dispose agents to produce practices related to policies” (p. 731). These authors also discuss policy as having an effect within the policy field (i.e., policy agents acting on the policy) and beyond it (e.g., media reports). We examine the Dutch field of education through the positions and discourses of experts who are bringing specific dispositions, rooted in their “primary” (i.e., early socialization-based) but moreover in their “specific” habitus, to the field (on these concepts, see Bourdieu, 2000, p. 164; for an empirical application of Bourdieusian notions of primary and specific habitus, see Desmond, 2007.

In what follows, Dutch educational experts’ arguments about how best to diagnose problems as well as how to deal with them will be treated as what Bourdieu called position-takings. The key theoretical insight here is that such position-takings can only be adequately understood relationally in terms of similarities with and differences between other position-takings. Applying this line of thinking to the Dutch field of education, we would expect that the structure of the space of positions tends to constrain—and, indeed, to reproduce—the position-takings of elites such as those we interviewed. Within a given educational field and among those in key positions who wield high levels of symbolic authority, consistency or inconsistency in diagnosing problems and advocating reforms can have massive implications for the system’s ability to innovate, for its ability to reduce inequality of opportunity and for the level of urgency that is felt about, for example, segregation. Symbolic struggles “at the top” of fields of education are spaces with potentially enormous implications for reproduction but also for potential transformation.

The field of Dutch education

The Dutch educational field is a curious amalgam of meritocratic and choice-based elements, social-cultural segmentation and a highly centralized and quite egalitarian funding system (Ladd & Fiske, 2011). Compared to most other national educational systems, the Dutch system performs well in terms of many measurable outputs and also in many equity-related domains (OECD, 2016). However, it is also characterized by relatively high levels of segregation and rising educational inequality (Gillborn & Mirza, 2000; Heath et al., 2008; OECD, 2016).

The Dutch system stands out in a number of key respects from other educational systems. First, almost all primary and secondary schools are publicly funded by the central state but most schools are technically private schools, managed by school boards (besturen). Public (openbare) schools used to have the municipality as the acting “school board” but have, since the 1990s, also been managed by foundations (stichting), and are legally hence also “private” (Karsten, 1999). While the State centrally allocates almost all school funding and sets the targets for the expected output, schools, as managed by their boards, have great autonomy in how they attempt to achieve that output (Nieveen & Kuiper, 2012). Compared to most other OECD countries, most decisions concerning issues such as human resources, curricula and enrollment are taken at the school board level rather than at the city or other higher authority level (Boterman & Ramos Lobato, 2022).

Most of the publicly funded but privately-run (bijzondere) schools were originally based on different faiths. The carving up of the educational landscape along religious lines was part of a broader systemic “pillarization” of Dutch society that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the 1917 anchoring of equality of funding of religious schools and public schools (Sturm et al., 1998). Despite dramatic secularization, Catholic, Protestant and other faith-based schools still comprise approximately two-thirds of all schools in the Netherlands. Moreover, the legal framework with its roots in pillarization persists today, allowing for practically anyone to create a school freely as long as certain conditions are met. This not only facilitates the ongoing founding of different (nominally) Christian and religiously non-affiliated schools by existing school boards, but also the establishment of new faith-based schools (e.g., Hindu, Islamic), especially in the larger cities (Driessen & Merry, 2006). Furthermore, non-religious private schools are also common, typically revolving around specific pedagogical concepts and methods of learning, such as Waldorf/Steiner and Montessori (Inspectorate of Education, 2019).

Along with the opportunity to establish a school, parents have the right to select any primary school they prefer. This freedom of parental school choice at both primary and secondary levels, however, is in practice constrained by supply and place of residence and, at the secondary level, by the early-tracking regime, which we discuss below. In many non-urban contexts school choice typically entails choosing between a public or a publicly-funded Catholic/Protestant school. In the bigger cities, with higher densities and more diverse populations, parents can select from a wide range of options, although these may still be limited by specific school enrollment policies (Boterman, 2019). In general, the great variety of schools and relatively free choice has contributed to a highly segregated school landscape, which has both ethnic and socioeconomic dimensions. School choice can impact (in)equality, mainly due to middle- and upper-class parents selecting schools consciously and strategically, which tends to exacerbate intergenerational social reproduction through the concentration of more privileged pupils in more empowering schools (e.g., the Dutch elite school gymnasium) (Merry & Boterman, 2020; Weenink, 2007). As a result, the Dutch educational system has clear neoliberal characteristics with a focus on “individualization”, choice and autonomy (Karsten, 1999).

A second key determinant of the Dutch educational system is its stratification of secondary education and its early tracking policy. The end-of-primary-school (age 11/12) tracking recommendations (schooladvies) are based on standardized achievement tests¹ and teachers’ assessments of pupils. Early tracking has been shown to have, in general, deleterious effects on educational opportunities and outcomes for children from disadvantaged families, not only as a result of tracking per se but also inequalities leading to different assessments of pupils’ abilities (Korthals & Dronkers, 2016; Van de Werfhorst & Mijs, 2010). Studies on school segregation in the Netherlands (Boterman, 2018, 2019) suggest that the autonomy of schools and parental choice are also conducive to educational inequalities because the tracking of young children is influenced by which primary school they attend (Kuyvenhoven & Boterman, 2021). On top of this, some urban schools face a multitude of problems, creating very suboptimal learning conditions and sometimes the school environment can be downright “toxic” (Boen et al., 2020; Paulle, 2013). These high levels of school segregation, together with the lack of permeability between the different tracks and the tracking recommendations given to pupils at the end of primary school being far from a perfect predictor for educational performance, reveals significant flaws in the meritocratic principles of the Dutch system (Inspectorate of Education, 2017).

Data and methods

To address our main question, we combined elements of conventional expert interviews with a slightly unorthodox, more informed and interventional approach in which we presented ourselves as (critical) co-experts (Bogner & Menz, 2009). We selected our sample of eight experts from our personal network in the educational field in the Netherlands and, more specifically, Amsterdam. This network has grown out of years of experience working as researchers in the field in which we are also often consulted as experts ourselves, and in that capacity also have worked with these experts. The experts in this study are deliberately chosen based on their expertise, their influential positions and hence because we (two of the authors) have maintained long-lasting and cordial relationships with them for many years. This specific sample presents some clear advantages but obviously also presents some challenges for the validity of this study.

The eight respondents played, and in some cases continue to play, different roles within different institutional contexts (see Table 1). They all have at least a college degree (many at the doctoral level) and most hold senior positions. However, they differ in academic background and the professional roles they have played. While all are white and belong to the professional middle classes, they may have developed different dispositions in respect to educational policies that are rooted in their “policy habitus”.

Table 1. Respondent characteristics.

Respondent	Profession (recent)	Governance level	Education
A	Director school board; senior policy maker, Inspectorate of Education	Local	PhD Computer Science
C	School headteacher	School	MA Educational Research
L	Data advisor; researcher (municipality)	Local	BA and MA Social Science, Teaching grade
M	Senior advisor, city; Inspectorate of Education	National	MA History
P	Director Primary Education Inspectorate	National	PhD Cultural Studies
R	Research advisor, city; university researcher	Local	MA Educational Research
S	School director (pension)	School
T	Senior advisor (Inspectorate of Education), university researcher; policy advisor (OECD)	(Inter)National	PhD Political and Social Science, MA Economics

Interviews

The interviews we conducted are similar to the approach discussed by Kosunen and Hansen (2018), who applied a narrative discourse analysis methodology, based on the narratives of a small number of selected education experts. While they focus on reconstructing the historical narrative of Finnish education, we aim instead to map the education field in the Netherlands, thus the time dimension is less explicit in our methods. We are, however, interested in an expert perspective on the educational field as a whole (Neil & McLaughlin, 2009). By providing a broad and open question and a fairly loose structure, we are interested in giving space to the narratives as they are expressed by the experts. These narratives are a “powerful discursive practice in policy-making” (p. 717). The interviews lasted between one and two hours and were conducted in English and Dutch. In the next section, we elaborate on how the interviews were analyzed.

The first part of the interview was based on an item list with broad open questions, the first of which was “What do you see as the main challenges in Dutch education?”, thus allowing the experts to articulate their views. While expert interviews are usually used either as explorative or as systematizing knowledge (Bogner & Menz, 2009), we rather interviewed experts for development of theory (Meuser & Nagel, 2009). We did not consult the experts for their insights into the issues at hand but for their understanding of and positioning vis-a-vis those issues. By starting the interview in as open a way as possible and out of curiosity, we aimed to unearth not knowledge about the field of education per se but narratives about it. We wanted to unveil what our respondents take for granted and what they problematize.

In the second part of the interviews, we positioned ourselves as co-experts more explicitly (Bogner & Menz, 2009), affirming our symmetrical interaction, which was also manifest in the many counter-questions asked by the interviewees. This second stage also included a more critical stance from us, as interviewers, which built on the unfolding interview but also explicitly brought in prior knowledge and earlier statements drawn from our existing relationships. In this stage of the interview, the interviewers and interviewees were interacting as fellow experts. This was part of our original research strategy, and only possible through longstanding solid relationships of trust. Through the rather equal and also more interventionist and sometimes more critical interactions, the interviews/discussions now yielded data qualitatively different from that revealed in the first part of the interview.

Analysis

We combined content analysis, working with inductive coding of the transcribed interviews, and narrative discourse analysis, which traced the dominant narratives about Dutch education, expressed throughout the conducted interviews but also drawing on interpersonal remarks and official statements in experts’ professional capacities. The first parts of the interviews were coded based on independent coding schemes of the interviews by all authors. The codes used followed our original item list quite closely, but also contained some additional codes that emerged inductively from comparing our coded interviews. The second type of analysis relies on the work of Kosunen and Hansen (2018), who investigated the dominant narratives among experts. We report on these two types of data in different sections of this article. The first part aims to demonstrate the experts’ understanding of the Dutch educational system. The second part of the analysis explores how our respondents frame the main challenges and proposed solutions through their narratives on the Dutch educational system.

Reflection

Our research methodology offers some unique advantages. Experts and powerful agents generally tend to be careful about making potentially controversial statements. Here, the mutual trust between interviewers and experts increased the reliability of our data as we could expect honest and thoughtful answers. The symmetry in terms of knowledge that comes from the fact that two of the authors have—at least in terms of research-based policy formation processes—occupied positions that are somewhat similar to those occupied by the experts being interviewed also allowed for a discussion of equals, in which the interviewers were able to critically assess and engage with respondents’ statements.

However, the relative familiarity between researchers and interviewees also presents some challenges in terms of the external validity of the study. Its strength, namely, the unique relationships between experts and scholars, makes it difficult to replicate or verify the study. It builds on our relationships and is to some extent therefore our narrative about how experts discursively construct the Dutch educational field. We try therefore to be as reflective as possible and avoid overstating our findings. Furthermore, we are careful not to make any truth claims regarding phenomena about which we present no empirical data (for example, everyday life in classrooms, struggles involving discrimination or the perceptions of parents and teachers). In short, we attempt to be as critical as possible about our own positions, theories and data collection methods.

Analysis

Logics and challenges

While our interviewees used different narratives to discuss minor and major flaws and problems, they tended to share a common interpretation of the system’s basic logics and challenges. Our overview of the defining characteristics of the Dutch educational field is largely reflected in our respondents’ narratives on how education works in the Netherlands. When asking about the main problems of the system, all our respondents at some point refer to something along the lines of what Bourdieu called the “logic of the field”. For example, several respondents refer to ways in which the Dutch educational system is based on meritocratic principles. In several cases, the experts commented that these principles are compromised/tainted/flawed in several respects. For instance, R and L discuss the system as follows:

It is not fully meritocratic. Background seeps in, in different places and especially in these transitional phases. It seeps in and takes away from the beauty of the meritocratic system. Where you are truly addressed on how well you perform and what your capabilities are. And not on who your parents are. (R)

[F]or their academic achievement it would be better to only be in the classroom with other kids who have just [these] high, erm … [long pause], abilities already at a young age.  …  Maybe other kids would profit from sitting in this group, but if you separate already an elite group at a young age, this elite group will grow and will probably grow faster and they will profit from it.  …  But it’s only really profitable for this group, for this elitist group. (L)

Both respondents discuss the relationship between pupils’ “capacities” and the ways in which the system is differentiated. Although they do not agree on the outcomes of the system, R and L both stress that the system derives its legitimacy from meritocratic principles while also partly failing to deliver on them. R is quite articulate in identifying the reasons why certain pupils end up in disadvantaged situations and why inequality persists. He highlights linkages between low student expectations and low tracking assessment, on one hand, and high schools being too selective, on the other:

 … a society benefits from an equal distribution between tracks. There should be vocational education, we need plumbers, people who are trained vocationally. I think we have too many people in university. If it shifts too much towards that you’ll have a dysfunctional society. And if you leave it up to the parents, they’ll think: I feel the importance of an equally distributed society, but it won’t matter if I put my child in a higher track. But if all parents start to think like that, there would be nobody left in the lowest track. And children will get very unhappy if they are stuck in a too high track. (R)

Regarding inequality, and alluding to Bourdieu’s idea of social and cultural capital, T claims that as certain schools are branded as though they are on the market, they attract certain types of privileged parents, who then subsequently benefit from the different kinds of “capital” these schools offer:

The danger is in that, there’s also a hidden danger of higher inequality. Because, if you’re making a new school … you’re branding your school in this market, it could be that it attracts certain types of kids and certain types of parents and you’re actually creating your little, private club there. Which, in a way, might not give you better knowledge, but might be a certain network, or whatever, that could serve as a capital later in life. (T)

Other respondents discuss the dynamic of capacity and tracking in the Dutch system in ways that resonate with Bourdieu’s concerns about symbolic power/violence acting at the level of the habitus:

You need to be aware that by differentiating so strictly, by [using] boxes, that goes into everyone’s mind, you know? Like in, kids are labeled by their tracks, … you’re imposing some kind of a growth limit to everyone else than the ones in the highest track. Because, psychologically, right, I mean, if you have a boundary above your head you start to believe that you can’t go further. (T)

Picking up on this, respondent T points to the institutionalization of tracking categories. While she also underscores (and seemingly also endorses) the meritocratic aspect of differentiation (by ability), she also highlights the fact that the socially constructed classifications and rules, embedded within the overall logic of the field, become seemingly neutral and naturalized realities. Educational tracks become largely unquestioned social categories leading not just to differentiation but also sometimes stigmatization (as in “vocational pupil” or a “gymnasium child”).

Relatedly, our respondents also acknowledge the role of testing in the educational system. Once more, while there is no agreement on the final verdict on testing at age 11/12, there is agreement that testing plays a central role in the dynamics of social reproduction through selection and tracking. R, for instance, connects testing to social reproduction:

And I think testing them objectively, like the CITO score tries to do, is a good way to give the teachers a mirror for themselves: am I advising them correctly, or am I letting that background seep in?  …  And the point when to measure, we measure too early. This is always a discussion in the Netherlands, because we measure at the age of 12, which is young compared to a lot of other western countries. (R)

T, however, argues the opposite and highlights the importance of standardized testing:

We had, like, really [a] one-time raise [i.e., increase] of inequality, because … they had the change of policy, where the teacher advice became more [influential] than the actual CITO-score of the children. Immediately, you saw the inequality between low and high social-economical class rising. (T)

Another respondent, P, does not agree about the effects of giving teachers more autonomy and making tracking decisions less exclusively dependent on test scores. P does, however, have concerns about the degree to which the system, in its current iteration, relies on testing:

The CITO-test, it was meant for children of, let’s say lower-educated parents of whom teachers thought they would never achieve anything, to give them an independent assessment. To reveal that they were actually brighter than one may presume. (P)

Testing thus ideally reveals the supposed “true” cognitive abilities of children, benefitting consistently underestimated children from lower socioecomic status (SES) backgrounds. This attests to a strong belief in the positive effects of a real meritocratic system, which should basically provide education at the “right” level. She continues, however, that the original premises of testing are now evolving into an undesirable performance-focused logic that is to her “very un-Dutch”:

But now it doesn’t work like that anymore, already for a long time … more institutionalizing of pressure on performance, and performing for that kind of testing, I find that very un-Dutch. (P)

According to our respondents, another key characteristic of the field of education concerns the relationship between school autonomy and parental choice. While they do not necessarily evaluate these forms of autonomy in the same way, they do articulate the dynamic in fairly similar terms. Above all, our respondents recognize the uniqueness of this highly differentiated system. T, for instance, praises some elements of the autonomy granted to schools and teachers in the Netherlands:

I mean if they have their independence, their freedom, they will be much better teachers than they are if you would just let them do the same thing every day. So I think that is incredibly strong and I think that in a way this agreement culture and consensus culture leads also to higher commitment of people doing well. (T)

However, other respondents see this autonomy of teachers and schools as problematic. Speaking about segregation and collective responsibility, A, and discussing linkages between educational supply and labour market demand, P, point to the suboptimal outcomes of a fragmented and autonomous system:

So first we fragment into autonomous schools and then they are all responsible for maximum performance for their own school. And there is no, like, mechanism on top of that to force people to take, like, social responsibility. That’s what I call suboptimizing. (A)

Rather, you want supply matching demand. Now there is much more supply than demand. But this is never equally distributed. So actually you [as a policymaker] want more control. (P)

Similarly, T argues that the almost absolute autonomy of Dutch schools has resulted in a lack of accountability and standards with which the Dutch state should be measuring the performance of schools:

[T]here is no enforcement mechanism to make them go outside their comfort zone or above the minimum. So, what schools are doing, they’re like, “okay, you know, I reach my minimum and now I need to cater [to] the population that I want to attract”. And then they’re coming out with all sorts of ideas, like … we have, like, currently more than fifty different concepts and profiles of schools in secondary education in the Netherlands. (T)

The autonomy of both schools and parents is mentioned by several respondents as a driver of segregation and therefore also an important problem of the Dutch educational system:

There is this principle of choice for parents. [It] is so ingrained in how we look at education, you cannot touch it. (A)

You have a lot of segregation … in the school market, also because of the freedom of education[al choice]. So, I think that this … freedom of education[al choice] and lacking of real checks and balances in the system, at the end of the day, leads to more segregation and a lot of irresponsible innovation. (T)

However, the interviews also revealed that there is no consensus about the effects of segregation on educational inequalities and on the quality of Dutch education.

I think that it doesn’t have to be problematic maybe, but it is now. That we are too segregated. (R)

I know segregation is an issue, but I think in the Netherlands also the issue is a complete lack of excellence. (T)

For both R and T, segregation is not necessarily a problem, unless it is related to creating socio-cultural “bubbles”, as described by R, or if it correlates to school quality. What bothers T is the lack of excellence in Dutch education, which is related to quality and the capacity to adapt to different forms of classroom diversity. As a former education inspector, M discusses the quality of education in respect to this issue, too:

I think that when we look at education, there is another problem. I think the quality of education could be much better. And that has to do not only with language and arithmetic, but also with the curriculum. I don’t think the curriculum takes very much into account the diversity that exists in schools now. So, the content of the teaching material, and the how children can identify with the the examples [used]. (M)

The multifaceted nature of the Dutch educational system is apparent in how the respondents articulate their perspectives on the logics and challenges. We now turn to the views of the respondents on possible solutions to these challenges.

Solutions

As with the suggested challenges, our respondents articulated a range of potential solutions and interventions in education. Most respondents focused on attempts to fight inequality and segregation within the educational system. However, respondent R argues that inequality cannot realistically be solved through mere educational reforms:

I sometimes have the feeling that we try to solve every societal problem through education.  …  For instance, inequality is not just addressing having good quality schools with a large percentage of students with disadvantaged background. It’s also tackling the problems at home. It’s tackling the parental level of education. It’s tackling poverty. It’s tackling neighbourhood segregation versus segregation [among] schools. (R)

This sentiment, that education is expected to fix all societal problems, is echoed to some degree by other respondents. Nonetheless, most experts do express clear proposals for addressing the problems and challenges within the Dutch educational system. Respondent A, for instance, suggests that funding mechanisms are crucial:

Ιf a school starts to segregate this way the funding will go up and the class sizes will go down and the art program will get better and people will get attracted to that … and if you go this way the class sizes will increase and I think this is a mechanism to introduce better incentives in the system that are automatic balancing … .  [Segregated schools] will become attractive to groups of highly educated parents and they will go to those schools if you do this. (A)

His argument is that the only way to “control” school choice is through highly-educated parents because they are seen as being more invested in education than less-educated parents who, in A’s view, tend to be less selective about the primary school attended by their kids.

Respondent C focuses on specific interventions, such as smaller classroom sizes (a maximum of 15 students) and hiring language specialists to assist students with language difficulties. She refers in particular to the recent policy shift in the Netherlands regarding financing special-needs students. The latest inclusion policy issued by the Dutch ministry of education promotes placing special-needs students in mainstream schools (Gubbels, et al., 2018). The funding regime is also where C finds possible solutions, although with a different focus, namely, teachers’ salaries. Ultimately a bundle of interventions can resolve the ongoing teacher shortages in the Netherlands, according to C:

I mean people from the outside also see [that the teachers’] work [is] really hard, they do not have that much funds, they do not get too much reward, like societal rewards for it, yeah, why would I become a teacher[? B]ut if you can see what you can do as a teacher, if you’re an excellent teacher and sometimes you read these interviews or you see portraits of teachers who really have that fun in class and also the students and that would be much, yeah then, then I think the shortage would also be much less. (C)

Respondent S says that disadvantaged students should “leave the streets” and “widen their world”. In this case, “widening” seems to imply ‘integratation” into some kind of middle-class and/or assimilated mainstream:

Those pupils sometimes never leave their streets, so [we must] make their world bigger, go to the golf club with those children, take them to a restaurant because they don’t dare to come here [at this café], they don’t dare to come here … widen their world. So they say, “well that’s interesting but I have to learn, I have to know something before I can go to this restaurant, before I can go to this cinema, before I can go to the golf club” … . It’s a very small way of thinking and that makes it difficult to motivate them because they think small. (S)

Similarly, for M, the students’ “knowledge of the world” and interaction with different settings, ideas and people are crucial. She argues that, to achieve aspiring students, teachers should have more time and space for ‘getting inspired’ outside the classroom, in combination with good leadership from principals. It is a blend of visionary leader and creative working conditions that M claims may lead to motivated students. She focuses especially on the importance of teachers relating to and understanding the students’ own experiences, adopting “holistic” approaches that involve not only the school but also “the street and the family”. P similarly refers to the transformative power of teachers, although her focus is on how student assessments take place. She would remove most of the existing tests in both primary and secondary schools, an approach that, as we have already started to see, is at odds with the analyses of several other respondents. She suggests that teachers aim for a deeper understanding of students’ abilities and development, tailoring non-standardized tests in order to facilitate students’ aspirations:

Do you have insight into where your child is, where your students are in their development? That’s really crucial. The question is whether the way of testing says anything about where that child is in his development. Because children who get high marks, are they doing well? Or is it too easy for them? And children who drop out, what about that? So you would like much more … that you work much more consciously on that development … but that young people themselves … become more intrinsically motivated to learn and with only that simple testing, the same for everyone, that does not work in [every] case. (P)

Respondent T focuses on changing the school curriculum, in accordance with her concerns about there being too much differentiation. She refers to Singapore as an “incredible” example of success through a standardized approach that can “raise everyone higher”:

[T]hey made an amazing curriculum … for example, in the Netherlands we’re very much believing in differentiation[. I]n Asian countries they don’t have differentiation, they think that everyone should be able to reach everything.  …  But they also have a very good curricula and they, in each stage of their educational development they actually thought of, where are we now? What do we need now? And how do we adjust teachers, teacher policies, curricula to that and how do we work with all of this, all of us together? And in the Netherlands … the inspector doesn’t know how to look at more than minimum level. So, it is logical that, at the minimum level we’re going to do well because, yeah, that is controlled, but everything else is just a matter of, like, opinion, or like, agreement. (T)

Hence, in her view, a solution would be for the Dutch ministry of education to “regulate the wildness” and the “freedom” of education. This process would be facilitated by a “stronger [institutional] body” that designs the curriculum for teachers, while also applying a more demanding evaluation system for schools that goes above simply a “minimum level”; T frames this environment as “responsible and sustainable innovation and educational improvement”. Moreover, T argues that teachers should be better paid and better regarded. Whereas in other countries teachers are respected, according to T, in the Netherlands teachers lack social standing.

Lastly, R would start with school quality. For him, this is a “holistic” issue involving student well-being, motivation and cognitive outcomes. All these, R claims, could be addressed through student assessment, which should not be based on a standardized test at such an early age; rather, it should be the outcome of a group decision (including teachers) within the school:

in a lot of research, well-being and motivation are connected to our cognitive outcomes. There is not one measure that measures the quality of a school. There are measures that proxy the quality of a school, like value-added, or in some cases, like the CITO-score, but that is a poor proxy for school quality. But they always narrow the definition of school quality. Even if you have a very good value-added estimate, it’s still often about cognitive outcomes. We need to focus more on the soft side of education, of which we always say “hey, that is an important part of school students” [but] it [is] very hard to measure. (R)

In this section we showed that, compared to what they had to say about challenges, the respondents displayed far more heterogeneity in their articulations about potential solutions. They generally expressed comprehensive visions for tackling problems, like addressing housing segregation, the general quality of education and the lack of social value afforded teachers. When they discussed specific interventions, their visions became even more clearly differentiated and out of sync with what the other experts had to say.

Discussion

In this article we conducted an analysis of the Dutch field of education by utilizing long-lasting relationships with key experts in the field. The “key players” in our study were purposefully selected based on their expertise and their cordial relationships with two of the authors. We drew on interviews and discussions with these experts, investigating their stories about and analyses of the Dutch educational field’s logics, challenges and potential solutions.

We found that our respondents tended to tell the same stories and seemed to concur on the main logics of the Dutch educational field. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, their stories echo many of the scholarly accounts of the logics of Dutch education, underscoring a meritocratic ideal but also emphasizing the high autonomy of schools and parents, together with high levels of segregation and waning educational performance. In contrast, the experts’ opinions on the ailments and challenges faced by the field converged much less, and almost every expert forwarded different solutions.

For instance, while some highlighted class-based segregation as a key source of inequality of opportunity, others attributed inequalities to low quality of education. Relatedly, some stressed the lack of funding for schools serving underprivileged pupils or for teachers across the board. Some of the respondents saw the highly fragmented and differentiated school market as key for understanding inertia in addressing the challenges; others emphasized lack of proper evaluation and accountability. Some respondents found testing indispensable for achieving a more meritocratic system in which class and ethnic background are reduced; others questioned the idea of differentiation altogether. Correspondingly, the forwarded solutions diverged even more.

Some experts suggested measures to increase social mobility and reduce segregation through incentivization (e.g., far greater funding for disadvantaged pupils), while admitting that such policies were extremely unlikely. They expected that, short of such bold measures, in the foreseeable future little would come from efforts meant to alleviate inequality or reduce segregation. Others proposed broader social reforms, both in education and other realms (e.g., poverty reduction).

Even though the respondents are professionally situated in similar realms (school management, research, education inspectorate) and were selected based on their long-standing relationships with the authors, there was surprisingly little convergence in their views on the main challenges and how to address them. The respondents agreed that the issues in Dutch education are multi-dimensional and multi-scalar and that they are connected to wider societal inequalities; however, they did not agree on which were the main challenges. We argue that the professional backgrounds and ways of understanding the world (policy habitus) of the respondents and the level at which they operate may be key for understanding why it is so difficult to find common ground. Experts in different organizations operating at different levels and from different disciplinary backgrounds develop visions of possible solutions based on knowledge and personal understanding of the field. The great variety of perceived problems and proposed solutions in our study may emanate from both the sources and scales of where they acquire knowledge about the field (their habitus).

On the micro (school) level, there is a lot of specific knowledge about everyday practice and pedagogy that engages with the life of students and teachers in schools, resulting in a focus on teacher quality and curricula. The mid-level (e.g., that of the municipality) agents tend to focus on local and meso-level mechanisms such as those associated with segregation within and across different urban neighborhoods. At the national level, both individual schools and the system as a whole are monitored, and analyzed within the context of international comparisons. However, at this level, there tends to be much less focus on locally specific mechanisms associated with, for example, segregation and inequality.

Inequality of opportunity seems, for some respondents but not for others, to be less a matter of education than of society at large. For those expressing such “broader society” arguments, schools are considered neither the cause nor the remedy. Even though inequality in general is discussed, there are very few references to racism (only once) or minorities (twice); in other words, our (white-middle class) respondents tended to stress SES as the key factor in educational inequalities. While this is in line with some existing scholarship on SES and race/ethnicity (Van de Werfhorst & Tubbergen, 2007), it corresponds less to the high levels of ethnic/racial school segregation (Boterman, 2019, 2022) and a growing body of literature on institutional racism in the Dutch educational system (Stam, 2018; Verkuyten & Thijs, 2002). More generally, the respondents seem to suggest that no matter what policy and tracking system is introduced, social reproduction will happen, especially as a result of parental strategies: when standardized testing is used to make tracking decisions, middle- and upper-class parents will hire private tutors. Meanwhile, when tracking decisions are made with less reference to standardized achievement, such as tests, these parents will put intense pressure on teachers in person. When there is free school choice, middle- and upper-class parents will simply avoid certain schools; if there is no free choice, they will move to a different neighborhood. Most of our respondents seemed quite aware of how quixotic attempting to mix schools, alleviate (the lack of) privilege and simply enforce a meritocratic system feels, agreeing that the game is rigged and extremely hard to change. The lack of coherence in problem assessment and the specific logic of the Dutch educational field observed by our respondents suggest the reasons why certain flaws in the Dutch educational field are difficult to address and hence remain salient.

Conclusion

Drawing on the case of the Dutch educational field we suggest some main takeaways beyond the Netherlands, as well as some policy recommendations. To understand how flaws in educational systems can be successfully addressed in education policy, it is paramount to understand how key agents understand and frame the logics of practice within the field and its wider connections to the field of power (cf. Lingard et al., 2005). This study demonstrates that it can be very insightful to research how agents articulate their perspectives on alleged challenges and potential solutions. Our analysis reveals that experts tend to share a professional, middle-class (white) outlook on and understanding of the educational field, drawing on the same sets of professional knowledge produced by specific academics and institutions. However, at the same time, they make sense of the field while drawing on different kinds of knowing (savoir), rooted in their respective policy habitus, which results in fragmentation in terms of the perceived problems and solutions.

We therefore suggest that policy makers, outside of the Netherlands too, do not rely merely on procured knowledge but also acquire knowledge outside of their circuit, for instance through observing directly what goes on daily in high-poverty and ethno-racially segregated schools.

Second, we suggest that leaders in the field of education engage substantively with researchers generating robust findings on successful interventions meant to boost the educational experiences and performance of underprivileged pupils. This means adopting evidence-informed policies and programs, drawing on research from a range of disciplines – including those outside the existing circuits.

A combination of these two strategies might be especially useful: directly observing what goes on in high poverty schools associated with proven effective interventions. Whether combined or not, and both in the Netherlands and beyond, these strategies might augment shared senses of urgency and solidarity among key players and, in turn, greater coherence with regard to concrete solutions for the field of education.

Statement from the Authors

The names of the authors are listed alphabetically as their contribution to the paper was equal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NordForsk [grant number 86103].

Notes

1 Most commonly the CITO test but increasingly other tests, too.