AERA Conference

In recent years, levels of democracy have been subsiding while authoritarianism, populism, and nationalism have been on the rise in many countries around the world (Bonikowski, 2017; Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Given the central role of education in political socialization, there is an even greater need now to pay attention to how different political regimes, such as democratic and autocratic states, have engaged in reform efforts in education. As reforms embody the aspirational goals and future promises of schooling that countries put forth, they are likely to reflect broader cultural beliefs in the status of education in society. How different political regimes express these cultural values through reform discourse is a main concern in this paper. Using a new data source of education reforms ranging years from 1960 to 2019, we investigate the types and characteristics of education reforms adopted in various regime types as well as how these patterns have shifted over time. The World Education Reform Database presents data on more than 10,000 education reforms from over 180 countries and territories. The data on reforms are collected from national level reports to major international organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, UNESCO, and the World Bank. In particular, we focus on two dominant rationales often used to adopt education reforms and consider how these vary across regimes: (1) education as a human right and (2) education as a tool for building human capital. We propose to analyze the intertwined relationships between these types of reform discourses and how they manifest in different political regimes.