Developing into similarity: global teacher education in the twenty‐first century

Abstract

This article explains the process that is causing systems of teacher education in the EU, the USA and elsewhere to converge into a form of fewer qualitative distinctions. We argue that expansion brought about by processes familiar to globalisation is creating wide differences in the cost of information that incentivises use of standardised patterns for producing teachers. The logic of institutional expansion, like the logic of globalisation, operates as a uniting force across previously regarded nation‐state boundaries and cultural distinctions. This brief study identifies institutional scale and the division of information as key factors that link the interaction of institutions across markets and adds insight into the critically important issues surrounding the production of quality teachers.

Keywords:

• institutions
• higher education
• teacher education
• globalisation

Introduction: globalisation and the economy of information

Our starting point is the proposition that the information systems of markets – economic, political, and social – are converging under the pressure of the rule‐making function of institutions. A market occurs whenever or wherever people voluntarily enter into a relation of exchange for goods or services. The public–private convergence of markets is brought about by expanding institutions and is both a cause and an effect of globalisation. If this is true, it means two things that concern teacher education. Firstly, it means there is a likely shift underway concerning the nature and vision of the education good, including how both the means and ends of teacher production follow the information direction of that shift. Secondly, it means that the looming controversy over which international domain – the private sphere of multi‐lateral firms or the public sphere of governments – is going to have supreme jurisdiction over the regulation of education, including formal teacher preparation, is ultimately irrelevant. Both points are of paramount importance to countries whose leaders regard teacher preparation as a public good in qualitative terms, that is, as an investment and key determinant in the productive base of human, social, and moral capital across a population. Institutional thought gives us a method by which to uncover these issues. We might mention that the theoretic and empirical study of institutions has received important recent attention from economists (e.g., North 1990; Hodgson 2006), social theorists (e.g., Rodriguez, Loomis and Weeres 2007), anthropologists (e.g., D'Andrade 2006), and analytic philosophers (e.g., Searle 2005). As rules of the game, institutions are the humanly constructed constraints that govern collective behavior; they are hidden persuaders (Hodgson 2006), the formal and informal rules and conventions that shape the process of collective action, human exchange and rational choice (North 1990).

Our basic argument is this: in the environment of globalisation, social institutions attempt to support the growth of markets and evolve with a general tendency to prefer a specific kind of information. That is to say, institutions direct the distribution of resources away from higher cost (particular) information, which nourishes qualitative dimensions of teacher development, toward lower cost sets of universal information, which tends to deplete it. In practice, this appears as the pursuit of standardisation in the creation of procedural rules and technical methods of teacher preparation, those that conform to broader interests and are conducive to large‐scale output and trade of a uniform product: the interchangeable, technically proficient teacher. The main result of this distortion in the information base is that it proves to be the basis for the convergence of public and private ends and means of production; it also yields a higher degree of interference by government power, which unknowingly does harm by preventing the free expression of more variable, vital, and arguably valuable forms of teacher education. Diversity of aims and provision, each situated in culture‐bound notions of education, assemble and alter in proportion to the information forces of scale and central control. Many in the EU view this development as a good thing; integration is a core cosmopolitan belief, a confidence that information costs tend to zero (few if any trade‐offs). Yet the caution flag must be raised in order to signal that the efficiency‐quality and order‐freedom trade‐offs negatively affect the complex good inherent to quality teacher preparation (Callahan 1962; Welch 1998). It does so because an information condition essential for minimising the tradeoff is not present. In this article, we show how the institutional setting of teacher education reiterates the trade‐offs of public–private convergence occurring in markets all over the world.

Our theoretical work here links facts to a mechanism operating within the expanding institution of education, which we call the division of information. This specific mechanism is an active catalyst inside scale‐influenced institutions and tends to promote institutional convergence. Put simply, the division of information is the cost‐reducing acts of trading off particular information for universal information. Particular information finds expression in independence, improvisation, value judgments, variable thinking, moral principles rooted within local cultures, customs and mores; all the essential aspects and distinct local preferences that influence human personality and the intricacies of human interaction and development. In the realm of universal information we find an information economy that corresponds to standardisation, consolidation, and integration; it is information fundamentally compatible with a capacity for generating order and stability, increased trade and prediction, fixed patterns of logical structures, and precise planning and control (Scott 1998). Hence, the dividing of these two types of information – particular from universal – consists in the trading‐off of local/individual concerns, say the concerns born by an individual nation‐state or locality, such as a university and its faculty, for standardised and legible information under central authority, e.g., a multi‐state or global authority. The process is an aggregative consequence of individual choice orderings under institutional expansion and a mechanism by which institutional expansion gets priced below its true social cost (Rodriguez, Loomis, and Weeres 2007). The preparation of teachers by colleges and universities operates within this information network and is not immune from these institutional forces. Ultimately, this state of affairs leans away from education as intellectual and moral work, and toward education as mere techne.

We should briefly note that the information convergence taking place between markets and the state appears to undercut certain tenets of public choice theory (e.g., privatisation of public education; see Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Ironically, much of the standardisation joining the two sectors has its origin in the private sector (standardised tests, accreditation regimes, private college and university admission's requirements, and assessment schemes). This is to be expected because the distinction between markets and government becomes attenuated through the interaction of scale and standardised information (rules, etc.). All of this is motivated by market integration under expansion. Both firm and state have ample incentive not to impede the integration of economic, political and social markets.

Integration is commonly viewed as a cost‐reducing situation, particularly for less complex goods and services. Consider, for example, Thomas Friedman's (2005) widely‐cited argument in The world is flat. Friedman proposes that the purpose and effects of uniform metrics (rules) is to flatten information for purposes of market integration. The homogenising effects and costs of globalisation appear to confirm that universal information is advancing against particular information across diverse cultures and social systems. Flat or uniform metrics standardise an institutional environment making human communication and the production and trade of certain goods easier and more efficient. On the global platform for collaboration, a large population of worldwide ‘players’ has emerged who were formerly excluded from the global network. In combination with a rapid reconfiguration of economic operations, these players are converging to create a truly flat world. Not only have these changes nearly negated the impact of geography on trade and communication, but through this convergence new political, social, and economic models are being created. In this sense, top‐down, hierarchical systems, organisations, and firms are rapidly flattening into horizontal, collaborative networks. They are doing so because the rules are being lodged in transnational organisations (GATS) and extended outward to greater geographic ranges, which help to socialise risk to all institutional participants thus allowing these (more local) systems, organisations and firms to ‘flatten’ information. In another sense, the broader geographic reach of institutional rules are becoming even more hierarchical and secure in trans‐national frameworks than they were under the nation‐state (e.g., the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations–ASEAN, and economic agreements in the North‐Central Americas). Once seen as a centralising power the nation‐state today often represents the domain of particular information (Habermas 2003). In either event, information is now equally accessible to anyone with minimal technological requirements, regardless of rank or education. Without a familiar (or local) top‐down chain for connection and communication, collaboration based on widely available and constantly increasing information is becoming a highly horizontal and indiscriminate reality across geographical, political, social, and educational boundaries. Institutional expansion allows for the reduction in bureaucratic apparati without a loss in central control (we develop this point in a forthcoming project). The question emerging for globalisation is whether it can preserve the development of complex goods like education.

Trade in teacher education

Today, in the global economy, education rules are also being extended across borders through political membership and through associative bodies of trade. In virtually all market sectors of education, including teacher education, these rules are facilitating immense international, cross‐border trade in higher education and give strong indication that the distribution of information can be found increasingly toward standardisation and the promotion of institutional expansion. As the scale of trade increases, the extension of cross‐border rules lowers barriers, when attenuating the costs of information, making trade more efficient and increasing the capacity to produce more of it. It is an alluring environment for many educational ministries and leaders of higher education who aspire to expand the scope of their country's or university's influence and trade to a global position.

Under expansion a seamless transition emerges from the lower ends of the educational hierarchy (government and independent schools, local school districts, local universities) to the upper ends (state ministries, federal departments, and regional and global international organisations) where the principles of central control are universalising property rights (e.g., rights of access), flattening communication platforms, creating greater efficiencies in trade, and maximising production activities through regulation by central authorities (e.g., EUROPA 2007). Expanding jurisdiction by education authorities likewise facilitates the unification of accrediting measures and broadens the incentive structures such that nation‐states in the EU and elsewhere have powerful incentives to trade on these new terms. What this implies is that state and private universities in the EU, the USA and other regions will come to look similar over time as they respond to the same central rules, procedural information and trading incentives. This is not a good thing because it does not account for key sources of variation and complexity in the construction of the good. These include, for example, specific cultural conceptions of the social welfare, faculty innovations, a people's history, the individual human being as an input, local understandings and notions of the education good, which is to say, all the valuable local information lost to education production.

The sheer scale of the technical model of education has interrupted qualitative and local emphases. The technical model of education is a rationalisation of processes and structures of education in the EU, the USA and globally. On the one hand, it induces greater cooperation and efficiency by standardising rules and unifying measures of production. In the USA, this looks like the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) standards. In 2007, 39 of 50 US states adopted or adapted NCATE unit standards and applied them for purposes of state approval (NCATE 2007). Traditionally, the US educational system has embodied principles of federalism where individual states and their local school districts were responsible for identifying production inputs and outputs, and where independent higher education had wide latitude in researching and developing social conditions, including those related to education. Part of this variability was centered on teacher quality in an era when educational attainment and teacher certification were reliable proxies for the kind of knowledge and skills necessary for complex work in schools. (As we will see below, the division of information puts in doubt the relationship between attainment or certification and the acquisition or possession of knowledge and skills). Today, the wide acceptance of NCATE standards as the primary national accrediting body raises new and interesting questions about federalism, centralisation, and the impact of uniformity of means and ends to teacher production. In the EU, the Common European Principles for Teacher Competences and Qualifications (EUROPA 2005) resolved to correct perceived deficiencies in the ‘systematic coordination between different elements of teacher education [that lead] to a lack of coherence and continuity’ (EUROPA 2007). Coherence and continuity reduce friction and enhance trade. They sustain the drive to direct from the centre and to align systems of creation with material gain. On the other hand, collective rationality in this area disregards vital information, the loss of which places at risk certain principles, freedoms, preferences and convictions that individual colleges and universities and their faculties may find important. In light of the technical framework, let us briefly discuss the central implications for independent teacher education programmes.

The technical model gains saliency across the institution of education by promoting central rules that help to lower costs in producing an education. Learning becomes education, education becomes schooling, acquisition of knowledge and skills become mere accumulations of schooling (attainment), performance assessment becomes a test score, teachers become technicians, school leaders become managers, etc. What the technical model means for faculty members is that teacher education is progressively shifting away from higher cost production preferences and toward lower cost and more standardised forms. The highly regimented information direction of the technical model of education puts many independent preparation programmes at risk of becoming isolated and seen as an inefficient way to prepare teachers. In the USA, liberal arts colleges, which operate outside of direct state control and which set a premium on developing liberally educated high quality teachers, are increasingly constrained by procedural rules to produce teachers in the same manner as large‐scale state universities. If this convergence movement continues, independent programmes that deviate from the technical model may be seen as irrational and increasingly in jeopardy of becoming marginalised.

On the opposite pole, isomorphic information forces (Dimaggio and Powell 1983) may lure independent programmes to move closer to the dominant technical model and away from the founding philosophies and academic traditions of their host college or university. On basic principles of collective rationality, independence, uniqueness and distinctives will be unconsciously substituted for the ability to ‘trade’ in the wider market of teacher education (basically to have programmes). Leaders of independent colleges and universities will want to continue to prepare teachers (they see it as participating in a public good), but for how long is unknown; it depends upon the organisational costs to those trade‐offs and how their teacher education programmes negotiate the environment of uniformity. Indeed, many university presidents and chancellors may not identify the problem because they do not see incongruence between growth and freedom.

What is the education good? Let us first discuss its context. Many independent preparation programmes believe that the good occurs in a highly complex, particular and situated exchange between teacher and student. This looks a bit different for different cultures and societies (e.g., Hilberg and Tharp 2002). What is common to higher quality programmes is that liberally educated teachers successfully negotiate the rough terrain of teaching by developing a set of skills beyond the techne (technique) of planning. Planning involves terms of specification, efficiency, universal parameters, measurement, certainty, standardisation, and so forth. The Behavioral Objectives Model is one example of planning (Tyler 1949; Bloom 1956; Krathwohl et al. 1956; Popham 1965). The influential ‘backward planning’ work of Wiggins and McTighe (2005) is a more recent expression of planning. Planning, in short, is ‘the rationalisation and regulation of the production of knowledge and skills; it is the logical ordering, the a priori patterns, of the educational experience’ (Rodriguez, Loomis, and Weeres 2007, 65). While independent programmes certainly do not neglect planning, many try not to allow the efficiency and technical aspects of planning to override, replace or interfere with the ambiguous, complex, and dynamic side of actual human exchange in and out of classrooms. Higher quality programmes emphasise the liberal arts (or skill domains) of metis (cunning, practical know‐how), arête (upholding virtue, including justice), sophia (the development of wisdom), phronesis (habituated good action), and praxis (helping to realize individual and community excellences) that comprise mastery of teaching. These arts as practiced by teacher graduates in the schools help to contribute to human development and civic life by preserving the higher cost information priorities of successful teacher‐student exchange, the preservation of which goes hand‐in‐hand with preventing information loss and the intricacies and nuances of human development (Rodriguez and Loomis 2007).

Looked at in another way, independent teacher preparation programmes try to balance the information preferences located within culture and the academic disciplines and traditions of their host college or university against the uniform rules of accrediting agencies and the state. Knowledge management is not an easy thing to do. The chief threat to independent programmes is that with the rise of scale and a progressive broadening of central rules (e.g., accreditation), education's rules of production become less able to satisfy the open information requirements of a complex, dynamic reality. They become an ineffective source of individualised information and are less able, therefore, to meet the diverse needs and interests of the public at large. So too, and for the same reasons, the logic that supports expansion and its rules constrains liberal, creative, and artistic ways of thinking within the institution. It alters the meaning and perception of the education good – the notion of progress, failure, the growth of the human being and of freedom. It sets in motion a process in which the starting point for education continually shifts away from the interests, instincts, and abilities of the individual person (teacher and student) or local community to the aims and interests of the impersonal institution, to the undifferentiated social whole or collective. The greater the scale involved and the more central and uniform the rules, the clearer this pattern becomes (Rodriguez, Loomis and Weere 2007). This is a critical concern for education faculty because the broader aims of independent programmes exist not to indoctrinate and condition, particularly, say, along a technical framework, but to situate a liberal higher learning environment for talented students where an intellectual and vibrant moral approach to life is achieved by individual graduates, on behalf of self (the well lived life) and for others (civic engagement). The aim of liberality depends on space for creativity and the risk that accompanies it. As Collins (1998, 80) notes, ‘creativity involves new combinations of ideas arising from existing ones, or new ideas structured in opposition to older ones’. On this point, intellectual dissidents are as valuable to the progress of education as are consensus builders. The question ultimately centres on freedom. Graduates from independent programmes understand that while they may have been educated to think liberally (creatively, etc.) their new profession is becoming progressively technical and insular. This brings to focus the internal threat to independent programmes: students will intuitively recognise that a constraint is levied against the art and practice of teaching and they will choose not to bear that cost; another vocational path will be chosen that has more opportunity or better compensates for freedom's loss. In other words, we could over time see both a loss of talented students entering the teaching profession and a decline in enrollment in teacher education programmes at independent colleges and universities.

Because policy and production questions all centre on the nature of the education good, it is essential to know what that good is. In general form, the education good is the ethical development of individual and collective flourishing in knowledge, skills, individual talents, gifts, and human capacities. Realisation of the good depends on the following law‐like principle: education goods tend to exchange in proper proportion to their information content. The information content within education necessarily affects the nature of the good being produced. A lower quality, quantity, and diversity of information tend to bring forth a sub‐optimal good, resulting in a poorer education for children, adolescents and adults (Rodriguez and Loomis 2007).

Despite certain powerful social forces that induce sameness, such as ‘institutional isomorphism’ (Dimaggio and Powell 1983), where organisations are found to reduce their social risk by mimicking each other across a field of knowledge (a reversion to the mean), we suggest that freedom, independence and differentiation are important features in the productive base of education, and that institutional patterns can and ought to be actively stewarded, negotiated, steered, altered, contested, countered, and possibly even resisted by individual actors (e.g., professors, leaders, teachers, students) as well as by organised groups (e.g., parents' organisations, professional associations). In other words, it is everyone's stewardship duty to understand how institutions function, how it is they can fall into disequilibrium, and what to do when that happens. These concerns about the subtle yet hostile effects of certain social structures were behind Alasdair MacIntyre's (1999) fine essay, ‘Social structures and their threats to moral agency’. His maxim is apropos to our study: ‘Always ask about your social and cultural order what it needs you and others not to know’ (328). If social institutions are indeed ‘hidden persuaders’ as Hodgson (2003) has called them, then this maxim is vital to keep in mind.

The hidden persuaders of globalisation and higher education

It is becoming more difficult to preserve truer forms of pluralism within the homogenising market of higher education. The interesting point to our argument is that no matter how educational trade is filtered, whether through public or private entities, and no matter which international organisation(s) emerge to regulate global trade in higher education (UNSECO, the WTO, the World Bank, OCED, etc.), each is attempting to expand the institution, to unify and to standardise its communication systems, measures and costs for cross‐border educational trade. Countries wishing to trade in educational services (e.g., the EU, the USA, India, China, and Brazil) will increasingly make the necessary trade‐offs and function within universal rules in order to capitalise on emerging incentive structures provided through globalisation. Universal rules are more marketable rules. Convergence entails a shift from less regulated markets to more regulated markets. Institutional growth shows that certain kinds of information are more marketable than others; specifically, it overvalues universal information and, at the same time, undervalues particular information. Incentives run both ways: in delivery and in receipt of services. The danger here is that as these opportunities emerge higher education may come to be viewed as a mere commodity (Peters 1992), which over time will shift the vision and nature of the education good away from complexity and toward simplicity.

In the public sphere, for example, conventions initiated by UNESCO for the cross‐border recognition of higher education degrees and academic qualifications date from the 1960s, with five such regional conventions occurring during the 1970s and 1980s: Latin America and the Caribbean (1975), the Arab states (1978), Europe (1979), Africa (1981), Asia and the Pacific (1983). The ‘Mediterranean Convention’, occurring in 1976 between Euro‐Arabic states whose countries bordered the Mediterranean, also covered the regional recognition of studies, diplomas and degrees in higher education. The European Convention of 1979 has since been replaced by a newer agreement known as the ‘Lisbon Recognition Convention for the European Region’ (1997). These early agreements, and the more recent UNESCO conventions on transnational educational trade, tend to protect – even encourage – member states' cultural and social preferences (internal sovereignty and ordering of property rights) relative to production while also seeking to import core UNESCO principles and educational rights. Likewise, the capacity building and standards‐setting functions of UNESCO revolve around certain political ideals of education as a public good which are grounded in a wider spirit of state‐regulated communitarianism (presumably) shared by member states (e.g., the ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Child’ proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 1386(XIV) of 20 November 1959). In as much as these principles are derivatives of state‐power, they tend to run counter to recent trends to connect productive activity through private markets, privatisation, and the commercialization (or commodification) of educational services.

An alternative model of educational trade has been put forth to compete with existing political ones. The negotiating forum of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) initiated trade liberalization in 1945. The GATT has brought about a ten‐fold increase in international trade. In 1994, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) extended the commodities model for trade in services, including higher education services. With over 140 member states, the World Trade Organisation, which replaced GATT in 1995, is responsible for the regulation of the GATS agreement. Four forms of trade in educational services are identified by the GATS:

1. Cross‐border supply of educational services from the territory of country A to the territory of country B. Distance learning is one such example. Country A in this example is the exporter of educational services.

2. The consumption of educational services by a student from country A in the physical territory of country B. Studying abroad is an example. Country B in this example is deemed the exporter of educational services.

3. A commercial service provider from country A supplying educational services to people in country B. Foreign universities and other organizations are an example. Country A in this example is exporting educational service to country B.

4. Faculty from country A exchanging educational services in country B. Courses offered by faculty from the USA in France might be such as example. Country A would be the exporter of services.

The framework and agenda of GATS is attempting to reorient the institution of education through a so‐called ‘progressive liberalisation’ of the rules – moving rules away from the unpredictability of political forces and toward the greater predictability of contractual situations. For example, article nineteen of the Agreement holds that, ‘Members shall enter successive rounds of negotiations…with a view to achieving a progressively higher level of liberalisation. Such negotiations shall be directed to the reduction or elimination of the adverse effects on trade in services of measures as a means of providing effective market access. This process shall take place with a view to promoting the interests of all participants on a mutually advantageous basis and to securing an overall balance of rights and obligations. (GATS, Part IV, Article XIX: 1).

Perhaps the more controversial provisions of the Agreement are these two principles: ‘national treatment’ and ‘most favored nation’ (GATS, Part II, Article II). The principle of ‘national treatment’ promotes undifferentiated, non‐discriminative treatment between domestic and foreign service‐providers. In other words, the internal political rules of a state, say the UK, may not seek to favor domestic service‐providers over foreign ones or vice versa. The principle of ‘most favored nation’ guarantees equal treatment among all foreign service providers operating within a member country: if a member country grants most favored nation status to one service provider from a GATS‐member country, all other service providers from GATS‐member countries must also receive the same status.

Hence the GATS‐rules of trade tend to impose boundaries or constraints on the internal political rule making within and between nation‐states. This growth of externalities and their processes has led to no shortage of anxiety on the part of political interest groups and organisations on the political left and right who believe that such agreements have shut them out as stakeholders. They often argue that they would have had greater access to influence education policy under the democratic processes of UNESCO. Yet other groups argue that competitive private markets will provide the features (predictability, risk reduction strategies, etc.) that will enhance investment thus leading to the development of underdeveloped countries.

On this background, several important stewardship movements have been initiated to protect higher learning. In 2001, higher education organisations in Canada, the USA, and in Europe entered a joint declaration regarding the GATS (Joint Declaration 2001). Principles set forth within the declaration enjoin market forces on the subject of transnational educational trade. Principles centre on education as a public good; that its regulation ought to come from ‘competent’ state or quasi‐state bodies; that education exports should not undermine developing countries' own development of domestic higher education; that transnational expansion of higher education will enhance the quality, relevance, and power of higher education; that transnational trade should operate under a ‘rules‐based regime’ (i.e., within the scope of UNESCO); and that public–private higher education systems are interdependent and cannot be separated as institutional subgroups. Also in 2001, two American higher education organisations, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the American Council on Education (ACE), made intra‐state efforts to reaffirm and to secure assurances against the rules of GATS in a letter to the office of the US Trade Representative.

With the addition of the International Association of Universities (IAU), CHEA and ACE in 2001 put forward a statement of normative principles that, they believed, ought to guide cross‐border trade in higher education. Their argument relied on the efficacy of the public sphere. Recommendations for stakeholders were: (1) respect states' sovereignty for internal policy, implementation, and regulation. Yet states must also ensure domestic access and equity; (2) promote the aim of assisting developing countries in order to promote global equity; (3) contribute to the broader economic, social, and cultural development of communities within the host country; (4) assure accountability to public, students, and governments; (5) minimise the barriers to mobility of faculty, researchers, and students; (6) make transparent educational trade at the national and international levels. Concerns centred on the (alleged) commodification of transnational trade in higher education, a concern that is driving higher education organisations in North America, Europe, and elsewhere to coalesce around an alternative set of standards (rules) grounded chiefly in political principles authored by UNESCO. In other words, higher education groups to date have tended to favor the political approach governing institutional expansion over approaches offered by a private market. This is so because education is usually viewed as a public good, which in part means, at least in theory, that the coordinating efforts of public entities balance individual‐collective claims to higher education access more legitimately than does a private market. Local concerns, as Habermas (2003) observes, may give way to superior political hierarchies but they do so with an aim of preserving democratic legitimacy and keeping public access to education from eroding. Initial alignment with the political apparatuses of states is unlikely to change over the coming decades.

Yet, in the long view, this form of stewardship activity makes little difference to the informational preferences of the larger institution. Why? Because its proposed solutions originate from within the technical framework itself. The larger picture under view is that whether through an international private firm (e.g., WTO) or through an international public body (e.g., UNESCO), few will suggest that the institution of education not expand; few will see growth as limiting freedom; few will resist the trade‐off of the local and particular for the central and universal. Virtually all stakeholders view the collective direction of the institution as rational, inevitable and the preferred direction. What is not widely recognized is that international treaties and global trade agreements as well as associative political bodies both perform their respective regulatory functions through the division of information. While nearly all of the regulatory work is oriented around expansion, all competition whatever is being filtered through the institution (i.e., the rules). In other words, the WTO, UNESCO, the EU (e.g., the Common European Principles for Teacher Competences and Qualifications), the USA (e.g., NCATE), and others continue to function within and under the same (or similar) information preferences and constraints.

The main trade‐off for transnational alignment is independence (freedom). A local college or university and its faculty are far less able to protect production preferences (e.g., a diversity or differentiation of ideas, provision, content, funding, planning, and assessment of teacher production) within an information economy that is tightly regulated by authorities far removed from the actual point of delivery and exchange. Multilevel governance regimes give way to a top‐down reordering of institutional rules over educational trade. What tends to happen, at a level difficult to see, is that an underproduction of the education good occurs; the particular information that cultivates a complex good is traded off for standardised information (rules) which brings trading efficiencies, but also brings poorer conceptions of the good.

Broadening the information base to teacher production

What we have shown in our theory of institutions is that the regularity in aggregate institutional behaviour determines the direction of production. The progressive rise of scale and its increasing volume of output and trade changes the kind of information that can be utilised in higher education. That is to say, as the scale of trade increases, its information base changes and so does the span of its control. Particular information is depleted and universal information is given preference. Control shifts from the local to the central. And the fact that resources are scarce (e.g., time, money, talent, ideas) changes the collective investment and forces a separation of the higher cost forms of information from the productive process. In considering a pattern of this sort, it is correct to assume that as an institution expands the aim always is to displace the less efficient with the more efficient, to open new doors to trade, to increase the level of demand. Thus it cannot avoid the call to standardize; it cannot avoid a transformation of its productive process; and, as a result, it cannot avoid a change in the vision and nature of its good.

A key intellectual challenge at this moment is how to preserve variation in higher educational systems, most especially in the development of quality teachers for schools. If the growth of scale and market convergence continually pulls systems of higher education toward uniformity, as it ties production to an integrated and standardised reference system that makes a gradual unification out of the diversity of educational systems, how can this process reverse? How can a nation‐state or a local entity's steering capacity resist reductive forces of globalization and protect its market of higher education? Theoretical and practical solutions to these questions will likely consider the role, importance and cost of particular information in the productive base of education.

In essence, independent higher education is facing two questions that place its identity and creative preferences at risk to the attractive efficiencies of the dominant technical model. The first question is how it defines the education good, whether this definition will hold over time, and, in the second, how to address the cost differences in information that threaten how that good is pursued. Hence research questions in this area are methodologically larger than empirical, positivist ones where evidence is coterminous to mere data. It would seem that a research agenda should also be pursuing first principles and questions – theoretical and practical – that are vital to the argument that teacher preparation works especially well in the context of independent colleges and universities. For example, what are the underlying theoretic assumptions and philosophic bases for a relationship between independent higher education and teacher preparation? Why should independent higher education participate in teacher preparation, especially when it is so much more costly to do so? What is it about the production environment of independent programmes that make them conducive to developing competent, effective and even brilliant educators? Those questions and many more cannot initially be answered inductively. For those concerned with such questions, what must be offered is a logical, theoretical, and intellectually appealing argument justifying production preferences on traditional, antecedent views of the education good.

As a general approach toward solutions, research and policy agenda should begin with recognising the extreme limitations of the technical model; that substantive reform will not be possible so long as such reform efforts remain within that inherently reductive framework. There are any numbers of directions genuine reform can take once education breaks from the uniformities of the technical domain, which, by necessity, must standardise the information available to choice. A few plausible directions might include: further theoretic work on the structure and logic of the technical model, e.g., what are the effects of institutional expansion (scale and scarcity) on information, knowledge, human and social capital development?; philosophical work on the nature of the education good, e.g., what are the necessary conditions for the realisation of the good?; empirical work in higher education decision‐making and the professional role of its faculty, e.g., what has been the role of a free, independent higher education system in democracies?; policy work on the nature of public‐private convergence, the state, and issues of market freedom, e.g., does market growth and institutional convergence correspond to the development of complex social reality?; and economic and sociological investigations concerning teacher development, quality, and local culture, e.g., are local culture and its particular information traded off during the distorting processes of the division of information found in globalisation? If so, how does this affect the quality of teacher development?

Likely to be discovered once the theoretic and empirical research is conducted are several general principles regarding programmatic quality:

	recognise and protect the complexity of the education good;
	enshrine and protect academic freedom;
	scale down learning environments;
	increase teacher development costs by concentrating resources on excellence;
	develop a liberal disposition toward variation, creativity and innovation.

What is common to research and policy agenda is that both must be grounded in a broader information field. Epistemological lenses need to widen in order to see and understand the information dynamics and trade‐offs to the production of teachers in the global environment. In this regard, social inquiry must follow questions about ‘what is’ with questions about what plausibly ‘might be’ or what ethically ‘ought to be’. All of these questions pivot on the complex nature of the education good and the information (knowledge) requirements by which to achieve it.

Notes on contributors

Steve Loomis is a philosopher of education at Wheaton College (IL, USA). His present research is concerned with the information economies of education.

Jacob P. Rodriguez is an educational economist at Regent University, Virginia whose research is concerned with social institutions.

Rachel Tillman is a doctoral student at the University of Denver (CO, USA).