Global policy convergence through “distributed governance”? The emergence of “national” education standards in the US and Germany

Abstract

This article focuses on the discussion of global policy convergence through the implementation of “distributed governance” within the education policy sector. Here, the focus is directed at the emergence of national education standards (NES) as a simultaneous instrument of fair school control and performance increase. Both the US and Germany show a high traditional resistance to nationally centralised educational control, but experienced a massive transformation in this direction by the recent implementation of a national core curriculum initiative (National Education Standards in Germany and Common Core State Standards in the US). This article will rely on global governance and distributed governance research, focusing on the concept of “heterarchies”, to analyse the interplay of global and national contexts in the case of the rise of NES in the US and Germany, ultimately showing the concepts' contributions (and limits) to explain policy convergence.

Keywords:

• education policy
• distributed governance
• heterarchy
• globalisation
• national education standards

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers and editors for their most valuable advice, as well as Richard Münch and Melissa Schuh for their regular feedback on this article.

Notes on contributor

Sigrid Hartong is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bamberg, Germany. Since 2012, she has been part of the research project “Transnationalisation of Education Policy”, which pays special attention to transforming shapes and logics of educational governance. In that context, she has been comparing standards-based reforms in the US and Germany, including the rise of new types of network governance and the influence of intermediary change agents.

Notes

1. This article uses the term “curriculum standardisation” after having taken into consideration that both the NES in Germany and the CCSS in the US are officially not representing a national curriculum. However, since the standards are meant to nationally benchmark and regulate learning content, they are ultimately directed towards curriculum alignment (Brass, 2014). Additionally, while the article refers to educational standardisation, it exclusively focuses on secondary educational standards, not including vocational or higher education.

2. The study is located at the University of Bamberg/Germany, Department of Sociology. It analyses the recontextualisation of globalised education policy within different educational regimes (England, Germany, Sweden, and the US) focusing on the transformation of governance through different school reform initiatives.

3. However, other prominent education policy researchers (e.g. Diane Ravitch in the US, http://dianeravitch.net/category/common-core/; Hans-Peter Klein or Wolfgang Meyerhöfer in Germany, http://bildung-wissen.eu) question this purpose and diagnose a revival of failed, over-estimated school reform (see also Payne, 2008).

4. The NGA and the CCSSO unite state governors and school officials (mainly commissioners) to form “col­lective voices” in Washington, DC, and to share “best practices” among state politicians and administrators (www.nga.org; www.ccsso.org). When being conceptualised as entrepreneurial actors, both organisations are structurally dislocated from the state level, while simultaneously representing the different states' interests. Hence, they form significant links between the national level and the different state contexts. In this regard, the NGA and CCSSO can be compared to the KMK in Germany.

5. However, global research on this constellation has not been conducted yet.