Global Education Reforms: Discursive Trends and Policy Impact, 1960-2020

All around the world, national governments adopt education reforms of various kinds as a strategy to improve their education systems. While some reforms aim to reach specific goals such as increasing access to education or improving student outcomes, others aim to focus on reorganizing education systems, by either creating new organizational structures or implementing credentialing, assessment, and accountability systems. Systematic analyses of national education reforms adopted globally can advance our understanding of the forces shaping education discourse. This is particularly meaningful given the recent challenges to the legitimacy of the liberal order (Mearsheimer 2019), which might ultimately shift the focus of education reform discourse across countries.

The field of Comparative and International Education is replete with studies dedicated to assessing the impact of specific reform efforts, while also attempting to take into account the immense degree of variation in the way reforms are both conceptualized and implemented across the world (e.g.: Carnoy et al 2017; Hanushek et al 2013). Instead of assessing individual programs or policies, our research team seeks to examine the trends, patterns, and effects of education reform discourse at a global scale, comparing across countries and regions. Our main goal is thus to better understand the global and national mechanisms that drive the decision to reform and how these mechanisms reflect cultural and political shifts. In this panel, we propose to present a set of five studies that uncover latent political trends of education reforms at the cross-national level.