Martin Carnoy

Transforming Comparative Education

Fifty Years of Theory Building at Stanford

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Fields of research are often shaped by "collectives" of researchers and students converging at auspicious times throughout history. Part institutional memoir and part intellectual history, this work takes the Stanford "collective" as a framework for discussing major trends and contributions to the field from the early 1960s to the present day, and beyond.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. April 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 224mm x 150mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 408g
• ISBN-13: 9781503608818
• ISBN-10: 1503608816
• Artikelnr.: 53544185

Autorenporträt

Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University School of Education. He is former president of the Comparative and International Education Society and is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association, and the Comparative and International Education Society. He has written more than 40 books on economic issues, racial inequality, and education policy, including Cuba's Academic Advantage (Stanford, 2007), and University Expansion in Changing Global Economy (Stanford, 2013).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1The Strands of Comparative and International Education:
chapter abstract
This chapter reviews the emergence of new ways of studying education
comparatively and internationally in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that in
the immediate post-World War II period reconstruction in Europe and Asia
and the advent of the Cold War put comparative education research front and
center in potentially influencing the political and economic course of
nations. As the role played by the field grew in ideological importance
through the 1950s and 1960s, an intense discussion developed around
methodology and the direction research should take. The chapter shows how
three different yet overlapping strands of research and teaching emerged:
introducing social scientific methods into comparative education; applying
academic research to educational developmental activism, and comparing
educational systems through measurement of student achievement and other
"outcomes" of schooling. These three strands continue to dominate the field
to this day, largely in the same structural forms as in the 1960s.
2How One Comparative Education Program Managed to Survive and Make Its Mark
on the Field
chapter abstract
This chapter describes the turbulent history of Stanford's comparative and
international education program over fifty years, since its founding in the
mid-1960s, and how the program managed to survive and flourish despite its
continuously precarious position in the School of Education. The chapter
argues that this survival resulted from a synergy between three core
components. First, the program trained its students using an
interdisciplinary social science approach to educational issues. Second, it
placed major emphasis on training students in critically and innovatively
applying methods from the social sciences. Third, the program became a
leader in the field through new theoretical approaches to comparative
education developed by Stanford faculty. These new approaches had worldwide
influence on comparative and international education research and the
training of students. The approaches had immediate influence on the
students in the program, who then went on to populate the faculties of
comparative education programs worldwide.
3The 1960s and 1970s: Human Capital
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the important contribution of human capital theory
to comparative and international education beginning in the early 1960s. It
recounts the author's personal involvement as a student at the University
of Chicago in the beginning of the theory's evolution, and how, through
early studies in Mexico and Kenya, he developed an alternative approach to
human capital as a tool to study education systems comparatively. This
alternative approach is described through an early work of the author's,
questioning many of the underlying assumptions of the theory. The chapter
analyzes the pros and cons of human capital theory and its potential for
and limitations in understanding both the expansion of education and
especially individuals' decisions as to how much and what kind of education
to take.
4The 1970s: Comparative Education and Modernity
chapter abstract
This chapter presents the major contribution to comparative education
theory made by Alex Inkeles and David Smith in the early 1970s. Inkeles
headed a six-country study on "modernity," which he and Smith defined as a
mode of individual functioning-a set of dispositions to act in certain ways
that were related to notions of progress and higher economic productivity.
The main hypothesis of the modernity project was that these "skills" or
worldviews or attitudes that shape behavior were learned indirectly through
the social structures in which people live and work rather than being
specifically taught in a formal sense. The chapter describes this research,
published in 1974 as the book Becoming Modern, goes into detail about its
underlying theoretical bases and results, and analyzes the reasons for the
resistance the study encountered at the time in the social science and
comparative education communities.
5The 1970s: Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and Comparative Education
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the critical analyses of education that emerged from
applying neo-Marxist class theories and existentialist critiques of society
to comparative education in the 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter reviews
how these analyses emanated from theories of dependency and psychological
"colonization," and how they challenged earlier social science approaches
to comparative education. It focuses on the author's writings of the early
1970s, which argued that the inequalities observed in education systems in
both developed and developing countries were not mainly the result of
"inefficiencies" of educational bureaucracies but built directly into the
class and racial reproductive nature of the educational systems themselves.
As the chapter spells out, this suggests that educational inequalities
largely reflected the inherently unequal nature of capital societies, the
degree of inequality of economic and power relations in these societies,
and the role that education was assigned in helping reproduce such
inequalities.
6The 1970s and 1980s: World Society Theory and Comparative Education
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the intellectual foundations of world society
theory, developed by John Meyer and his colleagues, and their evolution and
spreading influence on comparative education. It details how this theory
rejected two other explanations of the rise of mass schooling:
functionalist theories that saw it as a response to the imperative of
filling specific social functions-incorporating youth into an industrial
form of production requiring specific human skills and behavior-and
theories that explained the rise in terms of its crucial role in
reproducing class relations of production in a broader economic-political
functionalism. In contrast, world society theory argued that the
nation-state is an ideological project abstracted from any single economic
system or the interests of any social group. The expansion of mass
schooling, in turn, is the expression of a "modern" nation-state's drive
for legitimation within a wider world environment that defines progress and
modernity.
7The 1980s: The Politics of Education: Legitimation, Reform, and Knowledge
chapter abstract
This chapter describes the evolution of Hans Weiler's contributions to
state theory and their application to comparative education analyses. It
focuses first on Weiler's theory of compensatory legitimation, which posits
that the state has a substantial legitimacy deficit and attempts to
compensate for this deficit through policies that serve as strategies to
legitimate the state. Foremost among these are educational policies that,
Weiler argues, are used to give the impression of change and increased
participation, but are, in fact, substitutes for actual reforms. The
chapter then analyzes Weiler's second contribution to comparative education
theory: his analysis of knowledge and its role in higher education. This
concept centers on the relationship between knowledge and power. He argues
that knowledge and power are connected by a relationship of what he calls
reciprocal legitimation-that is, knowledge legitimates power, and
conversely, power legitimates knowledge.
8The 1980s: The State and Comparative Education
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses two additional state theories, one applied to US
education and the other developed to explain educational expansion in
socialist developing countries. The first argued that the state is
contested terrain and that change takes place in education and other sites
of the state through a process of contradiction and political conflict over
the shape and direction of education. These changes in education have
repercussions for civil society, including for the workplace. The argument
in the second theory was that the state, not the production system, is the
main source of the dynamic of postcapitalist socialist societies, and it is
politics, more than the relations of production, that drives their social
development. The theory also claimed that understanding how and why these
states restructured their educational systems can-through comparison and
contrast-provide insights into how and why educational systems in
traditional dependent capitalist countries maintain inequality.
9The 1990s: Comparative Education and the Impact of Globalization
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses theories of comparative education that emerged at
Stanford in response to economic globalization in the 1980s and 1990s.Their
main thrust was that, paradoxically, as the world economy globalizes, the
nation-state continues as the political structure where educational policy
plays out. Yet that state comes under increased pressure from global forces
at two levels. First, those impinging on the underlying politics of the
nation-state, such as regional divisions exacerbated by uneven economic
development in the global economy and the increasing global use of
information technology to define nation-state politics. Second, by global
organizations explicitly attempting to shift policy making away from
nation-states to international agencies. Unlike the world society theory's
overarching ideological conception of the nation-state-one that converges
nations' thinking about education and human rights-these organizations
represent their attempt to apply uniform explicit educational policies
globally to all nation-states.
10The 2000s: Impact Evaluation and Comparative Education
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses important new analyses of education that estimate
various school interventions' causal effects on student outcomes. Such
estimates allow researchers to describe relations between school inputs and
student characteristics or how educational systems are designed (e.g.,
teacher incentives) in one country and in different country contexts. To
illustrate, the chapter focuses on three impact evaluations recently
completed in China by Stanford faculty. One uses a strong identification
strategy treatments' impact on student outcomes and two are randomized
trials. The first study estimates the impact of vocational education on the
outcomes of computing majors. The second uses an experimental design to
test the effect on teacher practice and student mathematics achievement of
a two-part teacher professional development program in one province. The
third conducted a randomized trial to estimate the effects of several
different designs of teacher pay incentives on teacher teaching strategies
and student outcomes.
11The 2000s: International Tests and Comparative Education
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the pros and cons of the most influential "movement"
in comparative education in the past two decades-large-scale international
tests. The chapter describes the arc of international testing from its
early days in the 1960s, as an effort to obtain more data to compare
developed country educational systems, to the present day of massive
multiyear testing on a world scale, "league table" comparisons of average
national student performance, and drawing educational policy "lessons" from
the educational practices of high-scoring countries. The chapter analyzes
the advantages for comparative education analyses of the great increase in
data about educational systems internationally and the many flaws in using
international test scores to draw inferences about whether and why some
countries' educational systems are "good" or "bad" and about the
relationship between student test scores and future national economic and
social development.
12Where Is Theory Headed in International and Comparative Education?
chapter abstract
This chapter speculates about future directions for comparative education
theory. The chapter begins with potentially new contributions from impact
evaluation, international testing, state theory, and world society theory
as the influence of globalization and information technology on political
economy and ideological norms (including individual identity) intensifies.
The chapter concludes by discussing how other theoretical conceptions of
educational issues could impact comparative education over the next
generation. One of these is feminist theory, with its potential to alter
assumptions concerning the definition of educational goals and the
evaluation of educational processes. A second is learning theory, and its
potential for changing the way tests are used to gauge whether students are
"learning more" in one country than in another. Learning theory may also
find new ways to better understand what education systems in different
societies actually do rather than comparing educational systems'
"effectiveness" based on one or two specific outcomes.