School Policy Reform in Europe - Exploring Transnational Alignments, National Particularities and Contestations

This book discusses national school policy reforms in a number of key European countries and shows how these are framed in transnational collaborations that meet with national particularities and contestations. It gives an overview of school policy developments that represents the diversity of Europe within a comparative framework.

It takes point of departure in the fact that European countries in their school and education policies have been increasingly aligning with each other, mostly via transnational collaborations, the OECD, EU, and the Bologna Process. Even the IEA has been instrumental to motivate alignments by means of influential surveys, knowledge production and methodological development. This alignment in terms of common standards, social technologies, qualification frameworks and so forth have aimed at facilitating mobility of students, workers, business and so forth as well as fostering a European identity among citizens from Europe's patchwork of small a nd medium-size countries, representing a patchwork of different languages, cultures and societal contexts. In national recontextualizations, however, alignments have been continuously contested according to the particularities of what has been possible educationally and politically in the different national contexts. Furthermore, the return of national(isms) as well as the rise of edubusiness and digitalization have been increasingly influential. This book thus concludes that increasing transnational alignments have to be observed with meticulous attention to different national contexts that matter greatly.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

Part 1. Introduction.- Chapter 1. School Policy Reform in Europe between Transnational Alignment and National Contestation (John Benedicto Krejsler).- Part 2. National Cases.- Chapter 2. Danish school policy: remaining Nordic while going transnational (John Benedicto Krejsler).- Chapter 3. England: Neo-liberalism, regulation and populism in the educational reform laboratory (David Hall).- Chapter 4. School Reform Policy and Governance in Germany between National and Transnational Expectations - with outlooks to Austria and Switzerland (Bettina-Maria Gördel).- Chapter 5. Transnational forces in Dutch educational policies and practices (Theo Wubbels).- Chapter 6. French education policies and the PISA paradigm: the strong republican State absorbing external influences (Romuald Normand).- Chapter 7. Changing School Policies in Italy: From Welfare Equity model to the New Public Management instrumentations (Paolo Landri).- Chapter 8. Multi-scalar interactions and school policy: The tr ajectory of educational reform in Catalonia within the Spanish state (Antoni Verger).- Chapter 9. School Policy and Reforms in Poland in the light of decentralisation - between democratisation and centralisation (Joanna Madalinska-Michalak).- Chapter 10. Czech School Reforms: Between East and West (Petr Novotný).- Chapter 11. Education policies and reforms in Slovenia and Croatia: shared history, diverging paths (Eva Klemencic Mirazchiyski).- Part 3. Discussions.- Chapter 12. Ever-morphing relations between the global, supranational and the national in schooling policy: A reflection on some European cases (Bob Lingard).- Chapter 13. Europe as the exterior interiorized in the infrastructures of policy (Thomas S. Popkewitz).- Chapter 14. How context matters in European school policy reforms (Lejf Moos).