Very illuminating analysis by Allan Luke. -Angela
Generalizing Across Borders
Policy and the Limits of Educational Science
by Allan Luke
Abstract
This essay is a critique of the scientific
and policy rationales for transnational standardization. It analyzes
two examples
of policy export: early childhood standards in one
of North America’s oldest Indigenous communities and the ongoing
development
of international standards for university teaching.
It examines calls for American education to look to Finland, Canada,
and
Singapore for models of reform and innovation,
focusing on the complex historical, cultural, and political settlements
at
work in these countries. The author addresses two
affiliated challenges: first, the possibility of a principled
understanding
of evidence and policy in cultural and
political-economic context, and second, the possibility of a mediative
educational
science that might guide policy formation.
 |
| Dr. Allan Luke |
I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land. More than 2,000 years ago, Native American peoples established
communities on the bayou—trading at this juncture where rivers and ocean joined. Okwata, meaning “wide water,” is the Choctaw name for Lake Pontchartrain. Great rivers are prototypical media of communication (Innis, 1949),
places of cultural exchange, of the blending of knowledges and
cultures. The Yolgnu people of Northern Australia have referred
to garnma— “two-ways education”—as the meeting of salt and fresh waters. New Orleans is affiliated with the term creolization.
These waters have been touched by proto-globalization or, simply,
sedimented and resedimented layers of colonialism. Here
it occurred through the journeys of French, Spanish,
and British colonizers, Jesuit priests traveling the Mississippi,
Mestizos
and Creoles, African and Afro-Caribbean men and women
and children incarcerated and brought here against their wills, and
the First Nations peoples whose spirits reside in this
place, on this wide water (Spear, 2009).
My focus in this essay is on two related
questions. First, in a period where bodies, capital, and information
cross borders
at unprecedented scale and speed, how well does policy
cross borders? Second, what are the substantive consequences of
attempts
to move educational innovation and educational science
from one cultural context to another, from one nation to another, from
one jurisdiction and system to another? In an era
characterized by moves toward a transnational management model of
education,
the focus here is on the drive to standards, where
equity is couched in a new technical vocabulary of risk management,
market
choice, and quality assurance.
You will hear shifts in standpoint as this
essay moves across borders and boundaries, geopolitical and
epistemological. I
speak as outsider and insider; born and educated
Chinese American, I have worked in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and in
East
Asian and Pacific Island education systems as a
teacher educator, researcher, and policy consultant. I have written
critical
theory and I have been involved in
large-scale empirical studies. My current research is on Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander school
reform. Ten years ago, I crossed the unmarked boundary
between the university and government bureaucracy. I was deputy
director
general and ministerial advisor, directing system
reform in the state of Queensland, with 1,200 schools, 40,000 teachers,
and a million students. Eight years ago, I helped
establish Singapore’s first national educational research center,
setting
the parameters for that country’s first large-scale
evidence base for government policy.
Viewed from this autobiographical and
cultural standpoint, the relationships between research and the making
of policy, between
policy and classroom practice, between evidence and
reform are not abstract. They are everyday problems facing politicians
and bureaucrats, school boards, parents and
principals, teacher educators and teachers. Matters of culture,
ideology, and
political economy, further, are not incidental burrs
in the making and implementation of policy. They are essential, square
one considerations. Effective policy makers not only
consider bureaucratic capacity and implementation but also anticipate
local uptakes and collateral effects. Courageous
policy makers lead by building public understandings, engaging with
complexity
across real and imagined boundaries, moving toward
durable educational settlements around shared values and social
contracts.
This requires a close eye on the local articulation
and recontextualization of policy: a kind of narrative scenario planning
and public explication based on rich interpretive
historical, cultural, and political understandings. A narrow managerial
science cannot suffice for such a task.
I begin by offering encouragement not just to
researchers but to all who have worked in state systems and government,
who
sit on school boards or in university
boardrooms—encouragement to raise troubling questions in policy settings
where we are
pushed to take on the new common sense of
accountability through narrow metrics and through standards that do not
always do
justice to what is educationally and culturally
meaningful. There is a silencing process that goes on in institutions
pushing
neoliberal accountability: the stated or unstated
implication that critique is nonproductive and antiscientific, that
foundational
questions are irrelevant to the realpolitik of systems
reform. To say this is not a matter of romanticism or political
correctness.
It is testimony to the fact that the normative, the
ethical, the cultural—matters of value—have quietly slipped from policy
discussion (Ladwig, 2010),
overridden by a focus on the measurable, the countable, and what can be
said to be cost efficient and quality assured.
After a decade of implementation of centralized policy
in the United States and the United Kingdom, there is ample evidence
that the actuary’s approach can make for reductive
educational science, short-term policy orientations, and a plethora of
unwanted collateral effects at the school and
classroom levels.
This essay examines the scientific and policy
rationales for transnational and national standardization, focusing on
two examples
of policy export: early childhood standards in one of
North America’s oldest Indigenous communities and the development of
international standards for university teaching. It
then shifts focus to the current calls for American educational systems
to look elsewhere for reform and innovation—to
Finland, Canada, and Singapore—and documents the cultural and political
contexts
of these places and systems. My aim is to address two
affiliated issues: (1) the possibilities for a principled policy
borrowing
that begins from an understanding of cultural and
historical context and (2) the possibilities for a mediative,
multidisciplinary
educational science that might better guide such an
approach. My tools are story, metaphor, history, and philosophy,
leavened
with empirical claims. There are truths, and indeed
policies, that can be obtained through travel across place and time,
through
argument, history, and philosophy as readily as
through field experiments and meta-analyses. This essay, then, is a
deliberate
attempt to take readers elsewhere, to other places—to
Australia, to Ontario, to Asia, but as well to Indigenous communities
down the road and across the waters—and in so doing
perhaps to make the educationally familiar a bit stranger.
For policy debates and educational science
alike can and should begin from a recognition of the centrality of
history, place,
and culture—and, following Dewey, a recognition of the
primacy of issues of equity, morality, and value. My case is that
effective
policy requires a richer, broader cultural science of
education. In his 1973 article “Speech and Language: On the Origins
and Foundations of Inequality Among Speakers,” Dell Hymes (1973/1996) explained this as a “mediative” rather than “extractive” science—a science with the requisite theoretical humility to represent
and engage with communities’ and cultures’ everyday practices and rights, not to override and overwrite them.
Following the Leader
Writing in the New York Times, columnist Nicolas Kristof (2011) recently argued that America should look to China for examples of education reform. He praised the discipline and focus of
Chinese teachers and students. Also in the New York Times, globalization writer Thomas Friedman (2011) proclaimed the value of Singaporean mathematics education, although he cautioned of the need to borrow Singapore’s pedagogy
without its approach to individual freedom. In her important book The Flat World and Education (2008),
Linda Darling-Hammond discusses Singapore and Finland as models for
reform. Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan convened a summit of OECD countries
featuring discussions by representatives of school systems and
unions—with Ben
Levin (2008), former deputy minister of education for Ontario, outlining Canadian reforms. Reporting on the gathering, the New York Times (Dillon, 2011) quoted Andreas Schleicher, head of the Indicators and Analysis Division of the OECD’s Directorate for Education, on the
status of teachers and teaching in “high-quality/high-equity”–performing countries.
Could it be that American education is on
the cusp of “outside-in” reform—that the historical flows of expertise,
innovation,
educational science, and policy from the United
States have reversed? But on what grounds would a principled policy
“borrowing”
proceed?
When our academic generation began graduate studies in the 1970s, we inhabited a very different educational world. The term
“globalization” simply hadn’t been invented yet. As Kris Gutiérrez (2011)
reminded us in her AERA presidential address, we were the minority kids
of the 1950s who participated in nuclear attack drills,
used tracing paper, learned the new maths, read
Dick and Jane, and, I recall from 1962, debated in class whether China
should
have the nuclear bomb. In that world, the public
good was the national good, the domestic good was the
global good. We were taught then what we now call American
exceptionalism: that the American public good—whether in terms
of economic growth, two party politics, or the
newfound postwar discourses of civil rights and equity—was good for
everybody,
everywhere.
This concept extended to the history of
the field of education, where American educational innovation—from Dewey
and Thorndike
onward—was taken as generalizable to other parts of
the world, as providing universal educational truths about universal
human
learners. In my doctoral research in the early
1980s, I traced the 25-year movement of U.S.-based testing and
behaviorist
approaches to reading from Teachers College and
Chicago, across the border to Toronto, and across the continent to
ministry
offices on Vancouver Island (Luke, 1988).
I recall one of my late Chinese aunties telling me about meeting John
and Edith Dewey in Shanghai in the interwar period.
Dewey’s lectures in Japan and China after World War
I, which I discuss later in this essay, have a continuing influence in
those countries. When I taught graduate programs in
Thailand in the 1990s, I was struck by how closely the graduate
training
programs of major universities resembled those of
the American Midwest—where our Thai colleagues had gone to study under
Vietnam-era
aid programs. For the last century, then, American
educational research, innovation, and reform have traveled across
borders,
just as European colonial education did in
centuries before.
There has been a transnational “generalising” (spelled with an s
in the Queen’s English) across borders, often uncritical, often as part
of aid and development programs, and often with little
close analysis of its cultural and social effects.
In a field that is concerned about the dangers of generalizing across
states,
school systems, and student cohorts without the
vaunted gold standard of evidence, there has been little hesitation in
transporting
curriculum; pedagogy; models of the principalship,
school governance, and reform; assessment and evaluation, models of
child
development and learning—and, as I’ll argue here,
marketization and privatization—to other countries. This is done through
aid programs; through fellowships; through UNESCO,
the World Bank, and the Asia Development Bank; through international
journal
publication, citation, and ranking systems; and
through the training of international graduate students. It may be done
through
the shipping of in-service programs or exportation
of textbooks, tests, or performance indicators, wherever we parachute,
container ship, or franchise educational expertise
and commodities without substantive engagement with local histories,
cultures,
and difference.
Yet the work of American educational
research is itself culturally produced, the product of a distinctive
configuration of
educational histories, social problems, political
economic contexts, and systemic and ideological constraints. How
generalizable
is American educational research beyond borders?
Even after the 1972 Arab oil crisis, after A Nation at Risk
in the 1980s, there was no domestic discourse on globalization. With
the exceptions of the work of Paulo Freire, and of the
well-documented Anglo-American reinterpretation and
appropriation of Vygotsky, examples of the outside-in importation of
ideas
and paradigms to the United States are extremely
rare. Educational systems in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were defined
principally in terms of a development paradigm.
Hence the work of American educational research in a Cold War and
postwar
era replicated an inside-out model of innovation
and policy that was predicated on the rest of the world’s playing
developmental
“catch-up” with American schooling. It is important
not to caricature the effects of the development paradigm. Work in
poverty
amelioration, the education of girls and women,
language-in-education planning, and the expansion of universal free
education
and university infrastructure were important
moments in the postwar modernization and development of many
postcolonial states.
Yet even critical work tended to replicate an
Anglo/American focus on gender, class and race; and distinctively
American work
on cultural and linguistic minorities continues to
be generalized to other populations and other cultural milieux, without
critical or empirical recalibrations. In the
context of the current dilemmas of school reform, to continue to define
American
education as the apotheosis of the development of
the school and the center of educational science is, at the least,
ironic
and, at best, in need of critical scrutiny and
recontextualization.
Those of us working in Australia and New
Zealand, Canada, and Europe are not exempt from the pitfalls of the
postwar aid model.
A narrative case: In the mid-1990s, I evaluated an
AusAid program on Tarawa atoll in the island nation of Kiribati. We were
examining the Australian construction of middle
schools on North Tarawa Atoll. We took a long ride in an open boat
across
the 15-kilometer lagoon to arrive at small villages
without electricity or running water. Students and teachers used
palm-walled,
coral-floored constructions, which provided cool,
all-weather learning environments, where they blended English-medium
instruction
with vernacular language use. At the same site, we
found unoccupied concrete-block, Australian-style classrooms and
Australian
furniture, learning materials and textbooks
disused, disintegrating in the sun and salt air.
If there are lessons from the literature
on globalization, they are that in a world of nonsynchronous and uneven
development,
(a) the “Other” nations/countries are not on a
linear evolutionary development aspiring toward the status of American
schooling;
and (b) global equality and inequality are linked;
that is, the transnational division of labor and modes of information
mean
that domestic policy and multinational corporate
action here have ramifications for jobs, workers, and the ownership of
means
of production elsewhere. We live in a complex world
of push–pull effects, where social and economic policies and practices
with specific domestic effects have fallout with
unpredictable half-life and collateral effects elsewhere on the planet.
But
these are lessons that increasingly fall outside of
the mainstream discourses and practices of school reform. Indeed, other
pathways, other pedagogic/curricular traditions,
other forms of knowledge, other forms of childhood and child rearing,
other
forms of school leadership and institutional
organization are possible and necessary, and may offer sustainable ways
forward.
Sciences, Standardization, and the Market
The idea of shaping societies and cultures through the metrics of objective sciences was lampooned in the first great science
fiction epic. Gulliver’s Travels (1726/2002) was a parable of colonialism, science, and politics written by Jonathan Swift and first published in 1726.
On the third of his journeys, Gulliver is admitted to the ruling
council of the Flying Island of Laputa. The council is
a robed priesthood, where all decisions—about
society, culture, war, peace, and everyday life—are determined by
scientists
who, literally, turn the levers and wheels of
machinery that provides metrical solutions. This was a prototype of a
mechanical
thinking machine—the “engine of difference” that
Charles Babbage would invent 125 years later (Kenner, 1968).
The object of Swift’s parody was the
Royal Society of England. One of the early goals of the Royal
Society—composed exclusively
of British male aristocrat–scientists—was to
develop universal standards of measurement and scientific procedure.
Hence, the
notion of a royal or gold standard of evidence. The
Society’s work ranged from early attempts to establish uniform measures
of distance, weight, and time—for example, it
established Greenwich Mean time—to establishing universal taxonomies,
categorical
tables, cartographies, and catalogues of species
and phenomena. And as Darwin, Lyell, and others would find out, it
provided
a gentlemen’s forum for the adjudication of
scientific truths and findings. The assumption was that the very
advancement of
modernity, of civilization as it was known,
depended upon this approach to formal codification and authorization of
method,
of definition, of procedure. This approach
subsequently enabled circumnavigation, modern Western medical science,
breakthroughs
in physics and chemistry, and so forth. In
Commonwealth countries, we refer to the pound, the gallon, and the inch
as “imperial”
measures.
For a moment, let’s set aside the genocidal and just simply silly forays of scientific and pseudoscientific truth affiliated
with the volatile mix of colonialism and science. It is not a pretty picture. We need to note and bracket Stephen Jay Gould’s (1981)
history of the sciences of eugenics and mental measurement, and
governments’ tendencies to select ideologically those scientific
truths that justified cultural, political, and
class privilege and that perpetuated economic and human exploitation. We
would
also need to acknowledge that Indigenous peoples
globally used other modes of navigation, other modes of healing, other
modes
of stewardship of the land and animals that would
have and/or continue to have different pathways—while their bodies and
artifacts
were measured, weighed, and presented at the
Society and preserved in its archives, such as the University of
Oxford’s Pitt
Rivers Museum. Martin Nakata (1997)
writes of the early-20th-century forays of British scientists to the
Torres Straits in North Australia to measure and record
observations of his ancestors. There are continuing
disputes over the repatriation of Indigenous remains in the United
Kingdom.
Indeed, modern science is predicated upon the establishment of uniform systems of measurement, common technical nomenclature,
and replicable procedures. As Michel Foucault (1972)
explained, Western science and governance alike work through the
construction of grids of specification for the mapping of
human subjects. Further, the history of literacy
is, inter alia, a quest for mutual intelligibility, comprehensibility,
and
transportability of messages via access to shared
codes and symbolic systems. For example, a specialized register of
English
is the international standard for air traffic
control, where mutual comprehensibility and replicable procedure are
key. Standardization
of this particular linguistic corpus sets the
grounds for interoperability, for commensurability, and for exchange
between
social and institutional fields, across cultures
and geographies. Part of the anomaly facing Adam Smith and his
19th-century
contemporaries was the absolute impossibility of
transporting and exchanging goods across jurisdictions because of
restrictive
taxation regimes and parochial protectionism as
goods moved across Europe. Forms of trade and exchange were further
impeded
by different railway gauges, different container
sizes, and indeed, different systems of weight and measurement.
In the field of higher education, following the Bologna Accords
(1999–2009), standards are justified in terms of the need for
transportability of credentials across borders. Different countries
use PISA and TIMMS data to check that their
curricula are of “world class” (Hopmann, 2008).
The case for an Australian national curriculum is that students should
progress on the same curriculum standards, regardless
of whether they live in the outback or the city. In
the establishment of state curriculum and legislation for performance
standards in the United States, the justification
is that standards are a road to the classical liberal goals of fairness
and equality of access. This is the logic of
educational standardization.
Yet there are other effects:
-
In the last two decades, there has been nothing less than an epochal shift: We now live in an era when schooling and education, teaching and learning have undergone a whole-scale redefinition by reference to a culture of accountability, performance, and measurability—excluding processes and outcomes that do not fall within the ambit of conventional measurement technologies;
-
This process has progressively increased the power of official authorizing, regulatory bodies for the setting and adjudication of standards; but, also,
-
It has established competitive markets to capitalize on the will to standards; and
-
These markets extend the reach of corporate products, defining everyday practices in educational institutions—and (reflexively) reinforcing the techniques of the applied sciences of educational standards and measurement that justified their introduction.
These markets are dominated by
multinational textbook and testing companies. For example, the battles
between Cambridge’s
IELTS, the Educational Testing Service’s TOEFL, and
other measurement instruments are more than technical battles over the
legitimacy of measurement of English language
acquisition. They are proprietary corporate battles over which products
will
determine what counts as English proficiency for
literally hundreds of thousands of students in what has become a
high-stakes,
multibillion-dollar global educational market. In
the United States, the legislation of scientifically based reading
instruction
has generated a competitive market of consultants
and corporate and university providers seeking government adoption of
their
products, a process accompanied by accusations of
misrepresentation and conflict of interest. My point is that the push
for
standards creates fields for capital exchange and
that these are dominated by sophisticated multinational edu-businesses,
redefining professional educators and students as
consumers (Luke, 2004). I am not sure that this particular conflation of business models with the actual work of educating1 is what Reid Lyon and colleagues had in mind a decade ago when they exhorted education to look to the pharmaceutical industry
for scientific procedures and standards.
This is the key policy question: At what
point does the search for standards in education, under the laudable
auspices of
fairness and access, become a stalking horse for
particular economic and ideological interests? Further, at which point
does
it actually have the effect of placing cultural and
educational, linguistic and sociocultural diversity at risk?
Policy Crossing Borders
I turn to outline two cases of policy crossing borders: early childhood standards for the Pueblo Indigenous communities in
New Mexico and quality teaching metrics as part of the competitive ranking and funding of universities.
Mary Eunice Romero-Little is a Cochiti
Pueblo researcher at Arizona State University. Over the past decade, her
work has documented
Pueblo child rearing and childhood and the
experience of Cochiti Pueblo children as they move from family, home,
and community
to early childhood education. The Pueblo
communities are among the original peoples of North America and—despite a
history
of mission and federal boarding schools and
displacement and removal of their children in the last century—have had
documented
success in intergenerational maintenance of
languages and traditional practices.
In Standardized Childhood (2007),
Bruce Fuller describes the national and transnational push for
“standards” in early childhood. The general rationale for
state and national policy makers is that early
intervention can lead to improved educational achievement and cognitive,
linguistic,
social, and emotional capabilities—and that
children from poor and cultural minority backgrounds are most at risk.
The stated
goal of standards for infancy to age four is equity
of access to infant care, child care, and quality educational and
health
services such as Head Start. In policy documents,
the aim is to develop state regulatory “blueprints” and “learning
guidelines”
(Schumacher, Hamm, Goldstein, & Lombard, 2006).
These will set the foundations for expanded professionalization of
early childhood workforces, licensing and accreditation
of programs and facilities, and performance in the
allocation of funding. Comparable approaches have been developed across
OECD countries (Tobin, 2005).
Romero-Little (2010) describes the context of Cochiti Pueblo child rearing:
Traditional ways to care for and teach young children were carried out through an intricate and dynamic socialization process shaped by Indigenous languages and guided by Indigenous epistemologies for thousands of years. In Cochiti Pueblo, . . . newborns are considered highly intelligent beings who come into the world with universal knowledge of both the spiritual and physical realms. (p. 12)
She describes a distinctive epistemic connection between the physical and spiritual worlds: “a sacred trust” and responsibility
that is not “spoken” in conventional terms (Romero, 2003, pp. 147–148). It is carried out through daily interactions in the home and performed in seasonal activities and events held
in the community such as in kivas
(ceremonial chambers). New Mexico’s 2005 state standards are viewed by
elders, leaders, and families in the Pueblo community
as a threat to language retention, to cultural ways
of childhood and child rearing, and indeed to their peoples’ “sacred”
knowledges and languages.
We spoke to him only in Keres at home and he was speaking it well. But then he went to headstart. The first day he came back and said to us in imperfect English: “Don’t speaky to that way (Keres), speaky me Ingles.” (Romero-Little, 2010, p. 12)
Yet Romero-Little does not reject out of
hand Western approaches to early childhood. Instead, she develops
community-based
criteria for the selection of programs. These
include a focus on essential cognitive and linguistic skills for
community and mainstream learning—but also requisite conditions
for Indigenous language use and retention, and the development of
“congruent”
cultural knowledges, ways of interaction, and
learning. Through detailed ethnographic fieldwork and participant
observation,
Romero-Little is able to establish new parameters
for policy that might work without deleterious cultural and language
effects.
This example of Hymes’s “mediative”
ethnography is not the current early childhood science that is used to
generate monocultural/
universalist standards and targets. Further,
Romero-Little’s work sets the grounds for the adaptation of particular
Western/European-based
approaches that, to borrow from Carol Lee (2001),
“culturally model” community interaction, learning, and vernacular
language practices. Here we see in sharp relief two contrasting
approaches: One draws from logical positivist and
developmentalist models of education and leads to a standardization of
practice.
The other, based on a Hymesian ethnography of
communication, yields a qualitative, interpretive, and culturally based
scientific
description. The two approaches set very different
parameters for policy.
My second case is the development of
standards for transnational comparison and ranking of university
teaching. In 2009, I
represented my university at the Third
International Conference on World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao
Tong University
(Center for World-Class Universities, 2009),
where the 100 top-ranking universities are announced annually. The
conference was sponsored by Thomson-Reuters. There were
over 200 delegates from universities around the
world: a curious assortment of university presidents, marketing reps,
heads
of international student recruitment, government
bureaucrats, freelance consultants, and some higher education scholars.
The
discussions were unique: A senior administrator of a
leading Mexican university discussed the recruitment of international
students; a ministry official discussed the
intention to establish Arab ranking systems; several Eastern European
academics
viewed citation indices as extending English
language hegemony; and, in the background, representatives of a leading
American
business magazine were recruiting consultants to
generate their own patented ranking system. This cast of characters is
neither
accidental nor incidental. In the boardrooms of
university management, a multitude of issues—government regulation and
funding,
philanthropic funding and investment returns,
university personnel management, marketing and branding, faculty human
resources,
regional partnerships and co-branding,
international student recruitment, intellectual property, metrics, and
comparative
ranking—sit in an uneasy remix.
The conference culminated in the
announcement of the Shanghai Jiao Tong top 100 universities—an
announcement accompanied by
a website launch, a pen with a rolling printout of
the top 100, and press and media interviews. Representatives of the Times Higher Education Supplement
ranking system, also funded by Thomson-Reuters, announced the
forthcoming launch of their annual rankings. The running commentary
among many of us was that if our universities had
been in the top 100, we would not have been there.
The Bologna Accords are now the paradigm case of a regional attempt to regulate or “harmonize” educational credentials as
per tariff and trade agreements (King, Marginson, & Naidoo, 2011).
The aim of the accords was to enable a freer flow across the E.U. of
educated subjects, and credentials, with verifiable
“quality assured” degrees and expertise across
borders. It was in part a question of the interoperability and
comparability
of the curriculum and assessment, degree duration,
and content coverage of, say, MBAs. This is a real issue for employers:
In 1997, I worked with the Education Department of
the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to assess whether onshore
and
offshore, online, and satellite campus degrees
awarded by reputable U.K., U.S., and Australian universities were
actually
indicative of capacity and fluency in the English
language.
Several presentations at the Shanghai
Jiao Tong conference discussed the impacts of the global financial
crisis on funding
of land grant institutions and endowments; others
focused on the use of journal-ranking metrics, indicators of comparative
research performance. (Publication and citation
metrics around research productivity began with the invention of early
versions
of the Web of Science in the 1960s at the
University of Pennsylvania, providing practical applications of the
postwar field
of scientometrics.) The new development at the
conference was the announcement by researchers working for the OECD and
the
E.U. on standards for quality university teaching
and research supervision. Some of the discussion focused on current
indicators
(e.g., seminar vs. lecture), ratios of tenured
versus casualized staff, staff qualifications, class size, outcome
indicators
(e.g., employment levels of students), and student
satisfaction and exit surveys. The notion of a universal metric for
quality
university teaching is intriguing, given the
distinctive curricular and linguistic traditions of universities and the
qualitative
research on particular cultural and interactional
styles of university pedagogy, where gender, class, and
cultural/linguistic
backgrounds make a difference (Unterhalter & Carpentier, 2010).
At the conference I asked whether assessment tied to rankings will have
the effect of driving the behavior of university
teaching toward the production of, for example,
increased student exit survey ratings. A panel of technical experts
working
on OECD/E.U. measures explained that the metrics
would be sophisticated enough to accommodate this.
My principal objection is that the
general corporatization of universities is already showing signs of
ironing out difference,
local academic and intellectual eccentricity,
eliminating courses and programs that do not generate revenue, and
gradually
re-normalizing national, regional, and cultural
traditions of university teaching. The ongoing debates in Oxford and in
French
and German universities—characterized in The Economist (“Free Oxford University,” 2005)
as the protection of tenured academics’ elitism, privilege, and
ungovernability—are manifestations of the general move toward
corporate managerialism. In Australia, universities
and their faculties are given overall numerical rankings and funding
based
on measured teaching quality, despite the
unreliability and sampling problems of exit surveys used. In 2010, all
universities
were supplied with tiered lists of journals field
by field, performance against which has been used to rank individual
schools,
faculties, and universities on government quality
rankings. By current estimates, the combined cost to government and
universities,
including additional staff time, infrastructure,
consultants, and software development, has been $100 million AUD (Rowbotham, 2011).
In universities, then, as well as in schooling, the total bureaucratic
rationalization of every operational component is
well apace, accelerated by declines of government
taxation bases and funding, endowment returns, and philanthropic
funding.
Thomson-Reuters provides principal funding for the Shanghai Jiao Tong Ranking; it also funds the Times Higher Education Supplement
universities ranking system, the IELTS English language proficiency
test, and the Web of Science citation ranking system
and is one of the largest producers of university
textbooks in the world. Its principal corporate rival is Elsevier, owner
of the Scopus rankings system. Thomson’s Prometrics
testing and online assessment arm was sold to the Educational Testing
Service in 2007 for $435 million, and now
constitutes that organization’s “for-profit” subsidiary. In effect, the
systems
for monitoring and generating standards for the
international comparison of university teaching and research,
proficiency
and entry tests, and a corpus of textbooks are the
provenance of several multinational corporations (Graham & Luke, 2011).
The international movement is driven by a new political economy of
higher education, where governments, transnational organizations
such as the OECD, and corporations together drive
an ideology of equity through market and standards. The result has been
that most of our universities now have developed
core administrative infrastructure for performance metrics, compliance,
and
strategic engagement with ranking systems, all
costly enterprises. There are, arguably, few institutions now outside
the reach
of this higher education global marketplace (Naidoo, 2003).
These two cases—early childhood education
and university teaching—illustrate the policy push across borders to
transnational
standards. Moves toward standardization and
corporate management have not overridden the role of national regulation
in Asia
or Europe—there are and will continue to be
significant local adaptations, critiques, and resistances (Mok, 2010; Rizvi, 2007; Shahjahan, in press).
Yet in boardrooms and staff rooms there is a new common sense: that
standards will enable equity, that this is about self-evident
basics, that teachers and professors will perform
better if there are stronger merit incentives and performance
benchmarks,
that to catch up with country or system X in the
competitive production of human capital requires a hard-nosed approach
to
outcomes, and so forth, that parents or communities
or international students must be able to access transparent
information
to enable market choices of educational goods and
services. But in each case, standardization of educational practices has
the potential to flatten out cultural, linguistic,
intellectual, and educational diversity, with potentially deleterious
effects
on residual and emergent educational traditions.
Borrowing and Recontextualizing Educational Policy
But what of the prospects for the
importation of reform from other systems to the United States? The
question is how and on
what grounds principled borrowings of policy can
occur. My point here is that educational reforms are complex and
embedded
contextual, cultural, and historical stories. The
extrapolation and recontextualization of innovation, reform, and method
need to be undertaken with caution.
First, a negative exemplar of policy
borrowing from Australia. In 2009, the Australian Labor federal
government took office
proclaiming its own “education revolution.” It
featured calls for a knowledge economy to be achieved through a national
curriculum
that focused on the basics, a one-laptop-per-child
policy, and an expanded testing and accountability system. Several
colleagues
and I made our contributions to the reform debate
in separate reports to the state governments of South Australia (Luke, Graham, Land, Weir, Voncina, & Sanderson, 2007) and Queensland (Luke, Weir & Woods, 2008; cf. Luke, Woods, & Weir, in press).
Our argument was as follows: Citing reanalyses of PISA literacy tests for 14-year-olds, we focused on what Schleicher (in press)
refers to as “high-quality, high-equity systems.” In regression
analyses, Canada and Finland have been more successful than
Australia in terms of ameliorating the impacts of
the socioeconomic background of students on literacy performance.
Australia
and New Zealand follow slightly behind, with U.S.
and U.K. results leading to markedly steeper equity slopes on
comparative
regression analyses. Broadly speaking, the
countries with more equitable results on conventionally measured
achievement have
longstanding commitments to public education and
comprehensive social welfare, health care, unemployment and pension
systems. On the other hand, countries with highly stratified
income disparity, measured by the Gini coefficient
of income variability, have much greater difficulty creating a level
playing
field for achievement. In the most simple terms,
poverty matters, and school achievement does not work independently of
combinatory
suites of social and economic conditions and
intervention policies.
Moving from these metrics to contextual
and historical policy analysis, we attributed the success of
high-quality/high-equity
systems to the policy balances of “informed
prescription” and “informed professionalism,” that is, a modicum of
centralized
prescription via assessment/curriculum dictates and
strong levels of investment in teacher education, in-services, and
professional
development. Finland and Ontario have several
common features:
-
highly qualified teacher education candidates and graduates;
-
extensive investment in in-service and ongoing teacher development;
-
what we termed low-definition or less prescriptive curriculum, with a strong emphasis on local board, municipal, and school-level curriculum interpretation and planning; and
-
low to moderate emphasis on standardized testing.
Note that these policy suites from
“high-quality/high-equity” systems do not follow the
standardization/marketization model
I have described above. But equally important, we
pointed out that Ontario and Finland, like Australia and New Zealand,
had
strong social democratic commitments to public
education, to educational principles of social justice—and that these
sat within
compatible commitments to universal access to child
care, health care, and social welfare infrastructure. We argued that it
was logical for Australia to consider closely
systems with comparable social contracts.
Our intervention failed. The education
minister (now prime minister), Julia Gillard, sought policy advice
directly from Joel
Klein. In forums sponsored by News Corp in Sydney
and New York, in accounts published in News Corp’s national newspaper The Australian, in talks at the Brookings Institution, Gillard publicly lauded the New York model of school reform.2
With few historical, curricular, governance, industrial, or
sociodemographic similarities between Australian schooling and
the New York system, the Australian government has
imported and adapted many reforms that will be familiar to this
audience.
These included expanded census testing in literacy
and numeracy, published comparative school test score performance, a
push
to a national curriculum as part of a high-profile
back-to-basics movement, support for a Teach for Australia program,
greater
budgetary and staffing decision making by school
principals, continued funding for the independent/private school sector,
and most recently, announcement of budgeting for
comparative teacher rankings and one-time merit payments. We are now
three
years down the road of reform: Staff morale is low,
teaching to the test has begun in earnest, and the first cases of test
score fraud are in play in several states. The
statutory body established to manage these systems has admitted that the
metrics
used on its website to compare the socioeconomic
backgrounds of schools were flawed, and school test-score comparisons
illustrate
unresolved technical issues of sampling and
measurement error (Luke, 2010).
These policy moves were made without a
published or publicly presented analysis by the government of current
system performance,
which is consistently in the top tier of OECD
countries. Those who have criticized elements of this policy agenda have
been
attacked in editorials and opinion pieces in The Australian (Snyder, 2008).
In effect, the Australian federal government chose to borrow reforms which a decade of U.S. research tells us have had at
best mixed and conditional, and at worst negative, effects (Fullan, 2011).
It ignored and, in instances, mocked cautions raised by a broad
spectrum of educational researchers and teacher educators,
unions and professional organizations as
self-interested, politically correct, and not in the public interest.
This speaks
to the transnational push to use highly selective
versions of educational research and empirical evidence to buttress
ideologies
around markets, around standards, around parental
choice, and around teachers and unions, teaching and professionalism.
To examine the alternatives, I want to
focus on the broader contextual variables that sit alongside some of the
successful
systems reforms on offer. I want to briefly revisit
Ontario and Singapore in light of my earlier claims about science and
policy traveling across borders. My emphasis here
is on the constituent role of cultural historical context and the
political
economic factors in the formation of policy and
practice. A decade ago, Ontario began a major push toward educational
reform.
One of its key architects was Ben Levin (2008),
then Ontario’s deputy minister of education under the Liberal
provincial government, now a professor at the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education (OISE). The Ontario
reforms followed the general parameters of the informed
prescription/informed
professionalism model. Ontario teacher education
programs are oversubscribed, with excellent students competing for
positions—and
provincial universities such as York and Toronto
run urban teacher education programs with a strong focus on cultural
diversity
and equity. Levin and colleagues worked with the
unions to develop a strong performance-based equity orientation, with
simple
messages about professionalism, about equity and
learning, and about accountability to community. In contrast with the
aforementioned
breakdown in relations between the educational
research community and policy makers, it is also worth noting that many
key
Canadian researchers have participated in policy
development and implementation processes at the provincial and school
board
levels.3
A modicum of curriculum specification was
undertaken; schools were asked to set and track targets for test score
improvement,
but high levels of support for teacher and school
development were provided. This included large-scale in-service training
and the establishment of a literacy and numeracy
secretariat with over 100 staff members to assist principals and
teachers
in developing and modeling effective programs.
Currently, many boards have moved toward developing and implementing
assessment-for-learning
and teacher-moderated assessment systems. There has
been no scripted instruction or scientific curriculum mandate—just
consistent
support of teacher professionalism to respond to
mandates for school-level planning and analysis that requires high
levels
of principal and teacher expertise. The Ontario
reforms have prioritized the expansion of adaptive professional
expertise,
rather than the production of routinized teaching
(cf. Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).
The results over the past five years have been solid initial test score
gains, now with some plateau effects; improvement
in the achievement of second language learners; and
according to PISA data, comparative success at ameliorating the impacts
of socioeconomic background. Important to note,
this foundational success has set the grounds for continued professional
development
and curriculum work in areas such as critical
literacy, Indigenous studies, middle school literacy and numeracy,
moderated
assessment, and so forth.
In 2009, the government supported a province-wide call for “A Renewed Vision for Public Education” (People for Education, 2009).
These reforms are not essentially about teaching methods, or correct
instructional models, or finding the right package—they
represent a distinctive Canadian commitment to
equity, to multiculturalism, and to a social contract between
government, communities,
and professional educators around education and the
public good. This is about education and equity as core Canadian
values,
not a search for scientifically derived technique.
Singapore schooling is a key component of
former Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew’s agenda for nation building. His
People’s Action
Party (PAP) has won every election since nationhood
in 1963. Over that 48-year history, Singapore has emerged as one of the
world’s leading economic powers, with the
10th-largest foreign reserves in the world, the 4th-largest banking
exchange sector,
and the busiest port and logistics center, while
producing 10% of the world’s microchips. When I arrived in Singapore,
the
minister of education explained that in a country
of 5 million people on an island of about 250 square miles—with no
natural
resources to speak of—the education system is the
core business. Singapore’s educational success as a top-ranked TIMMS
country
in math, science, and literacy is a national source
of pride—the country’s secondary school completion rate is over 95%.
Its
higher education sector is well funded and
supported: In 2005, the per capita government funding support for each
undergraduate
education student was approximately six times the
comparable allocation that I received while running a teacher education
faculty in Australia.
The education system is tasked with the
production of human capital, but as well with maintaining an official
multilingual
state and racial harmony among its Chinese, Malay,
and Indian populations. This is an education-obsessed country, where
fast-food
outlets in shopping malls reportedly put up “no
studying allowed” signs to keep students from hogging the tables.
When I arrived in Singapore in 2002, the
policy focus was to import specific innovations from the West—including
moderated
assessment, constructivism, higher order and
critical thinking, genre-based instruction, multiliteracies, and digital
learning—into
a system that many believed focused too much on
rote, traditional, didactic knowledge. Locals refer to the traditional
approach
as “East Asian chalk-and-talk.” My academic
colleagues and I at the National Institute of Education advised that it
was far
better to begin from a rigorous empirical
description of classrooms and schools, and then make policy choices
about reform
with a fuller estimation of cultural and social
consequences (Luke, Freebody, Shun, & Gopinathan, 2005). The resultant picture is featured in important work by Singaporean researchers: high levels of time-on-task, teacher-centered
pedagogy that is focused on curriculum content, and a very strong emphasis on basic skills (e.g., Kwek, in press; Koh & Luke, 2009; Kramer-Dahl, Teo, & Chia, 2007; Liu, 2007; Luke, 2008). At the same time, classroom observation and assessment documented clear thresholds and limits in autonomous, critical,
and higher order work.
Singapore’s successes in mathematics and
science education—and the identifiable strengths and weaknesses of its
traditional
pedagogy—are not in themselves the product of a
specific scientific or policy approach. The system works through a
structural
isomorphism where state, family, and corporation
are linked together to create a face-to-face culture, and where
education,
Confucian respect for teachers, and elders’
authority are at the heart of the social order. At the same time, this
particular
multiracial social contract and its educational
achievement patterns are not without empirical complexity, internal
contestation,
and debate (Hogan et al., 2005).
What if I were to suggest that we import
East Asian chalk-and-talk to Tennessee, or Ontario multiculturalism to
Arizona? Caveat
emptor—let the borrower beware, or at the least
borrow carefully. The relative success of each of these models is
contingent
upon context. In Ontario, Singapore, and Finland,
public education is part of a total cultural, social, and political
economic
settlement and is geared to the production of a
particular educational habitus (e.g., Simola, 2005).
Simply stated, all of these countries’ particular reforms—Finland’s
research-based teacher training; Ontario’s literacy,
multiculturalism, gender-equity, and antihomophobia
programs; and Singapore’s mathematics education—are produced and work
in situ. They are the products of histories and
cultures, always contingent and contested, and in each country they work
as
part of a larger governmental and community
commitment to specific visions of education as a public good.
Policies—successful and unsuccessful—are
ultimately epic poems or stories, with problems to be solved, heroic
agents, participants,
false starts and dead ends, and with endings, at
times happy and at times tragic. A principled policy borrowing depends
upon
an interpretive analysis of a whole educational
system in operation: an understanding of everyday cultural practices, of
diverse
communities and demographics, of contending
ideologies and relations of power, and of the human beings who make that
system
what it is. The stories of Singapore, Finland, and
Ontario are not about the triumph of scientific methods. They are not
about
the triumph of markets, or successful
standardization. They are about cultural and governmental settlements,
about durable
historical, social, and cultural commitments to
particular forms of education and, indeed, forms of life.
A Cultural Science of Education
Given my initial claims about the
problems of science, borders, and colonization, it would be ironic and
hypocritical for
me to write as an external expert with normative
solutions for the very complex problems facing American educational
research,
schooling, and society. Certainly, after my
description of Australian reform, you would not want to emulate us
emulating you.
There are two salutary historical lessons
here. First, policies do not always travel well. In fact, too often,
selective versions
of educational science, selective minings of
educational research are undertaken in the service of particular
economic and
ideological interests. To paraphrase Michael Apple (1979),
“the selective traditions” of educational research—like selective
traditions of curriculum—are fraught with motivated exclusions,
with omissions and silences. Further, as Apple’s (2000)
later work goes on to argue, these decisions are often driven by a
collusion of multinational corporate and partisan political
interests, now amplified by the work of those
transnational institutions that play an increasing role in the setting
of standards
for educational evidence and performance.
At times, these organizations make
principled efforts at evidence-based policy. In other cases, governments
are part of cynical
efforts to create policy-based evidence—to
reconstruct, after the fact, scientific rationales and data for overtly
political
and ideological decisions. Any of us who have sat
looking at multilevel solutions to complex performance and demographic
data,
or who have worked in schools, know how
interpretive and contingent our science is. But many systems and
educators now face
a push for standardization that exceeds the
imperatives for interoperability, where rationalizations of fairness are
used
to justify sameness, to flatten out diversity and
ignore difference. This is not the science of social transformation that
Dewey envisioned. It is an ideology of
marketization and standardization, aided and abetted by multinational
educational enterprises.
AERA, with its extension into a world educational
research enterprise, with all of its good intentions, needs to proceed
cautiously,
lest American educational science narrowly defined
leads to the elimination of local pedagogic traditions, Indigenous
cultures,
vernacular languages, secular and nonsecular forms
of what we, for want of a better term, refer to as informal education
and relegate to comparative studies—as museum pieces or token chapters
in a world of overproliferating handbooks and encyclopedias.
Second, on the subject of policy
borrowing, I have here argued that many of the effective educational
policy suites on display
are not methods or approaches that can be wrenched
out of context. They are themselves the products of long-standing
settlements
of the order described in Herbert Kliebard’s (2004)
epic work on American curriculum. What is needed in any process of
reform is a broad and encompassing social and cultural
debate; rich, multidisciplinary evidence; and a
settlement not just on a vision for democratic education but, as well,
for
a just and equitable society. Policy borrowing can
only begin from a consideration of local cultural context, historical
genealogy,
and contending ideologies. There are no scientific,
quasi-scientific, or pseudo-scientific fixes that can escape this
requirement.
To return to my other initial question:
How can we generalize educational science from one context to another?
It was Thorndike’s
belief that the generalizable science of education
would be based on behaviorist educational psychology: that is, a
psychology
of individual measurable difference. It was Dewey’s
belief, drawing from a larger canvas of pragmatism and symbolic
interactionism,
that educational science necessarily would start
with the social and end with the social, working through the complex
dialectics
of individual/society, culture/economy,
empiricism/hermeneutics. In this way, in a problem-based and
problem-solving science,
matters of ethics and values would never be taken
as subordinate issues. Since the very issues of science and art were
ethically
and value laden, so the conduct of that science
would need to be.
In Democracy and Education (1916),
Dewey proposed a philosophy of education that focused on “social
efficiency,” that is, the production of human capital,
laboring subjects. This focus he shared with
Thorndike, but he also argued for the importance of citizenship and,
indeed,
cultural transmission. What I have described today
is a move toward a global curriculum settlement around educational
basics
and “new economy” competences that focuses almost
exclusively on the measurable production of human capital. It pushes for
interoperability and equity of exchange, but in so
doing, it simply excludes other goals of democratic education—debates
and
learnings about civics, civility, language, and
culture; about diverse and common cultural touchstones; and about
learning
to live together—and it altogether ignores
Indigenous lessons about the stewardship of cultures, the land, and the
planet.
So what of educational science? In work on ecosystemic approaches to science, Jay Michael Lemke (1995), Cole (1996),
and others describe an educational science that does not attempt to
eradicate diversity and colonize difference. Diversity
is necessary for the survival of biosocial systems.
Those systems that flatten out or destroy diversity risk becoming
homeostatic,
closed, and ultimately unable to meet new
ecosystemic and biosocial challenges (Wilden, 1987). In digital terms, the very notion of “bandwidth” refers to a system’s capacity to handle requisite diversity of information.4 If we begin from definitions of cultures as based on tools and artifacts (Cole, 2010), we would have to question the effects of educational systems whose central aim is to standardize and constrain tool use,
to limit and delimit displays of what might count as an artifact.
I propose a cultural science of education
that asks these questions: At what point does standardization go beyond
any purported
need for interoperability—and become a repressive
limitation of the available, imaginable cultural tools and artifacts
and,
thereby, a sociogenetic limitation and constraint
on what can be thought, felt, done, and created? At what point does this
standardization become a liability, a risk rather
than an enabling condition for cultural and species survival?
Postscript
I would like to add some critical caveats and cautionary notes from the White male elders of this field. American philosopher
George Santayana is best remembered for his claim that those unaware of history are destined to repeat it. Santayana’s (2002) published letters describe his days teaching philosophy at Harvard in the 1890s. There, Edward Lee Thorndike, Gertrude Stein,
and others studied philosophy and animal psychology with William James (cf. Boring, 1959).
In 1939, Thorndike, by then 65 and
approaching the mandatory retirement age at Teachers College, was
commissioned by the Carnegie
Foundation to provide a comprehensive approach for
the application of psychology to society, economics, and human welfare.
Thorndike’s behaviorist stimulus-response bond
theory had set the terms of American educational psychology for a half
century.
He had established applications to mental
measurement, to genetic intelligence, to reading and lexicography, and
to industrial
management and labor (Clifford, 1968). The result was Human Nature and the Social Order (1940/1974), a tome of over 1,000 pages. He wrote:
The welfare of mankind now depends upon the sciences of man. The sciences of things will—unless civilization collapses—progress, extend man’s control over nature and guide technology, agriculture, medicine and other arts effectively. They will protect man against dangers and disasters except such as he himself causes. He is now his own worst enemy. Knowledge of psychology and its applications to welfare should prevent, or at least diminish, some of the errors and calamities for which the well-intentioned have been or are responsible. It should reduce greatly the harm done by the stupid and vicious. (Thorndike, 1940/1974, p. v)
Thorndike was writing at the end of a
decade of economic depression, a moment when the world was becoming
increasingly aware
of the rise of Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism but
had yet to confront the large-scale state use of pseudoscience. For
Thorndike,
it was a behaviorist psychology of individual
difference that would guide the engineering of society for the common
good.
A decade later, after the dropping of the atomic bomb, John Dewey, age 89, returned to write a second introduction to Reconstruction in Philosophy (Dewey, 1920/1948),
a collection of lectures originally delivered in Tokyo in 1919 after
World War I. He defended the enterprise of a problem-based
scientific and philosophical approach. In the face
of the logical positivism forwarded by Rudolf Carnap and others and with
the storm clouds of McCarthyism on the horizon (Reisch, 2005), Dewey wanted to reassert a science and philosophy that dealt with cultural morals and values. For Dewey, morality was a
“practical sociocultural fact” from which all inquiry proceeded:
The simple fact of the case is that any inquiry into what is deeply and inclusively human enters perforce into the specific area of morals. It does so whether it intends to and whether it is even aware of it or not. When “sociological theory” withdraws from consideration of basic interests, concerns, the actively moving aims, of a human culture on the ground that “values” are involved and that inquiry as “scientific” has nothing to do with values, the inevitable consequence is that inquiry in the human area is confined to what is superficial and comparatively trivial, no matter what its parade of technical skills. (Dewey, 1920/1948, p. xxvi)
This interpretive community, this
educational research association, has been here before. The question is
not one of a binary
of science or superstition, measurement or chaos,
quantitative or qualitative truths. It is a question of what will count
as science—whether and how a generalizable
educational science is possible, what its principled uses and grounds
are, what
it can teach us, and what that science ignores and
places at risk.
Article Notes
-
ALLAN LUKE is professor of education at Queensland University of Technology, Faculty of Education, Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove Campus, Brisbane 4000, Australia; a2.luke@qut.edu.au. His current research is on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander school reform.
Notes
-
Spoken language, unlike written language, is tied to a speaker, whose spatial and temporal performance are used by hearers to establish reference and meaning. For this Educational Researcher article, I have maintained the spoken register from the original AERA (American Educational Research Association) lecture in New Orleans to maintain a focus on narrative and the significance of place—key themes in the 2011 AERA annual meetings.
-
Thanks to Kris Gutiérrez and Joanne Larson for their support in framing and preparing this work; to my many Queensland University of Technology colleagues and students for their substantive criticisms and revisions; to Mary Eunice Romero-Little for providing generous access to her work; and to Jay Lemke, Michael Cole, Courtney Cazden, James Ladwig, Tara Goldstein, Ben Levin, Alfredo Artiles, and James LaSpina for their ideas and comments.
-
↵1 Media corporations model what Veblen (1923) referred to as the supplanting of “industry” (the actual labor and technology of production) by “business” (commodification and marketing); see discussion in Graham and Luke, 2011.
-
↵2 See, for example, an account of these comments at http://www.brookings.edu/events/2009/0619_australian_education.aspx.
-
↵3 Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, Kenneth Leithwood, and others have provided key input at the provincial, board, and school levels. Many of us in the literacy education community have supported the work of the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat of the Ontario Ministry of Education and continue to work with local school boards.
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↵4 My thanks to Jay Lemke (personal communication, January 2, 2011) for this observation.
References
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doi: 10.3102/0013189X11424314 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER November 2011 vol. 40 no. 8 367-377
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ALLAN LUKE is professor of education at Queensland University of
Technology, Faculty of Education, Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove
Campus, Brisbane 4000, Australia; a2.luke@qut.edu.au. His current
research is on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander school reform.
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