The need to reform pedagogical practice in Peruvian schools has been on the country’s policy agenda at least since the mid-1990s. Since then, the country has undergone several attempts at reform through curriculum change and various in-service training attempts that relied on top-down implementation models and achieved only partial changes. In 2013, an innovative programme named Soporte Pedagogico (SP) devised a strategy to work on changes from within schools and intervening in several key areas at once. It combined teacher mentoring with training workshops, strategies to strengthen a school’s pedagogical leadership, remedial strategies for students lagging behind and parental involvement for improving learning. In sum, an integral approach to reform pedagogical practice. While implementation and impact evaluations showed great promise in the programme, the Ministry of Education introduced cuts and later dismantled the programme. The story of SP is illustrative of how the political economy of education policy making and reform operates in contexts described as Sysiphean states, whose weak institutions give rise to often erratic policy making processes. The case of SP also speaks about how competing visions of education – technocratic versus pedagogically minded – might clash and work against promising change strategies.

This chapter presents a special instance of education reform in which South African students presented a compelling case for curriculum change under decolonization. At first, it appeared that all conditions for successful change were in place – receptive university leadership; compelling educational rationale; pressing political demand; and widespread support among academic teachers. A massive colonial statue was toppled of the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes on the University of Cape Town campus. For a short but powerful moment (2015–2016) academic faculties refocused their energies on critical concepts such as decoloniality, what it might mean and how it could be implemented. Special seminars, invited speakers, funded projects, senate authorizations, and commissioned task teams sprung into action to “decolonize the curriculum.” Five years later, little had changed both for the disciplinary curriculum (e.g., sociology or chemistry) or the institutional curriculum (i.e., the rules and regulations that govern legitimate knowledge). Why? Based on interviews with more than 200 academic teachers across 10 universities, this case study demonstrates how exactly institutions temper radical ideas. This is a specific case of radical reform in a broader struggle to decolonize knowledge from Cape Town and Bristol to Antwerp and South Carolina.

This chapter reviews the development and implementation of English school education policy following an exploratory report by the Department for Education and Skills on the future of primary school collaboration and three major Blair (Labour) government initiatives focused on inter-school collaboration: the New Labour Academies; the Secondary Leadership Incentive Grant programme; and the Networked Learning Communities programme (and their further evolution under Brown (Labour)) until 2010. It traces the dramatic intensification of these policies under the Conservative–Liberal Coalition including incentives to create new academies and Teaching Schools. The Conservative policy also revolutionised school administration and performance by removing the remaining state schools from local government control. The stated aim of a 2016 White Paper ‘Education Excellence Everywhere’ was that, by 2022, every English state school would be in a multi academy trust. It is now past 2022 and, while this goal has not been attained, there is no doubt that ten years of a combination of policy and austerity have transformed England’s state school systems.

This chapter summarizes the evidence provided in the previous chapters that Anglo-European developmental psychology and education have been limited by a pervasive bias toward individualism. This is despite the focus of international educational assessment bodies on collaborative skills as being necessary for all students. The result of this has been a lack of robust findings, especially regarding social development, and an education system that is largely ineffective for students who are not from Anglo-European backgrounds. Addressing these related issues requires a shift in educational practice and policy toward collective achievement and collaborative forms of pedagogy. The chapter recommends the first steps toward moving education away from an individualistic paradigm. These include changing the unit of analysis from the individual to the interaction, creating group-level outcome variables, and restructuring learning environments. Multiple levels of schooling – the curriculum, instructional designs, the structure of schools, policy, assessment, and teacher training – are all discussed in terms of how they would need to shift to support collaborative competence as a goal for all children.

Prior to the late nineteenth century, Chinese scholar-officials studied ancient Chinese history to make sense of contemporary affairs. Thus, rather than situating themselves in global space when they traveled outside China, they attempted to situate the world within China’s historical time. This chapter contends that world-historical writing emerged in China in the early twentieth century after the rise of print capitalism as an attempt to address concerns about global space. Specifically, the question of how to make sense of China’s decline in the global order motivated scholarly interest. In this effort, the temporal dimension of ancient history remained relevant. In An Outline of Western History, Zhou Weihan juxtaposes the histories of foreign countries with Chinese chronologies. Zhou’s book is possibly the first Chinese-language work on ancient world history written by a Chinese scholar. In it, he stresses the value of ancient history and dismisses notions of fundamental differences among cultures in modern identities. As he repeatedly asserts, “Peoples throughout China and the West are alike – their intellects are the same.” Zhou’s absence of a cultural nationalist view is especially striking compared to the views expressed in later nationalist works published in China by the end of the twentieth century.

In the tradition of educational innovation, when we create something we like, we try to take it to scale. But schools that take thriving as a core purpose all have distinct purposes and approaches. Their approaches are embedded in a context, responding to local narratives, needs and resources. There is no way, therefore, to 'scale' thriving. Regardless, scaling in educating has mostly been unsuccessful. Instead we can focus on how to grow and spread the diversee narratives, logics and practices that promote thriving. This starts wih removing inhibitors, including our tendency to confuse measurable outputs of education with the outcomes we desire; the excessive scrutiny of some accountabilitty and monitoring sysems; and the lack of resources available in underfunded or inequitable systems. Then we can focus on conditions for growth: framing our purposes in design principles that support and direct decision-making; creating supportive newtorks of professionals and other partners; and developing a social movement for change. Thriving – at all levels – will become a purpose of school when more of us speak out openly to affirm that it should be.

Education systems were never previously designed for thriving – especially not by everybody. They now need to be, in the face of humanity's predicament. Education's purpose must be explicitly reconceived. Individual outcomes, even if defined as competencies (knowledge, skills, attitudes and values), are necessary but insufficient. Rethinking purpose is motivating and profound work. It is already an important focus in business, politics and civic society. For schools, COVID-19 has deepened the need to rethink their purpose. Schools are still needed, but they must be reinvented. Governments and systems need to support schools in the shift; some already are, including Finland, British Columbia, and New Zealand. The state needs to embrace alternative, broader outputs of schools. The personal experiences of two school leaders in the UK making the shift show how even in unconducive systems, progress is possible.

This chapter analyzes the role of public opinion in the politics of education reform in Germany. Being a federalist country, policy-making happens both at the federal level and the subnational (Land) level. We focus on Baden-Wurttemberg in the south and North Rhine-Westphalia in the west of Germany. We identify salient issues with coherent popular attitudes (such as the reform of upper secondary academic education), where we find a strong influence of public opinion on policy-making (“loud politics”). In the case of vocational education and training, in contrast, interest groups and “quiet politics” rule. Lastly, the domain of school reform politics, in particular the institutional setup of the secondary school system, is an area of “loud but noisy politics” with a high degree of partisan contestation. Thus, the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2 is broadly confirmed.

This chapter analyzes attitudes and preferences toward education spending. Relying on representative survey data for eight European countries, it (1) studies what citizens want when it comes to education spending and (2) explores explanations for these preferences, i.e. the main latent political cleavages over education reform. The first part of the chapter sheds theoretical and empirical light on the question how salient is education expenditure compared to other (social) policy areas. Moreover, it explores how attitudes toward education spending relate to attitudes toward means to finance this spending (via taxation, debt, or retrenchment in other areas). The second part of the chapter studies preferences toward the distribution of spending on different sectors of the education system. The results show, among other things, that compared to other issues education is highly salient, particularly schools and vocational education and training. While public support drops considerably once increases in expenditure come at a price, there is an astonishingly high support for education-related taxes. The chapter reports evidence for several potential cleavages over education spending (e.g. along respondents’ income and educational backgrounds), the most consistent one being a partisan divide.

This chapter studies the role of public opinion in the politics of education reforms in Sweden during 2006–2018. The chapter uses process tracing (based on primary and secondary sources as well as sixteen interviews with important stakeholders in the education system) to analyze what role public opinion has played in education reforms, from early childhood education to higher education. We find that the influence of public opinion varied depending on the salience and coherence of public opinion on the respective issues. The theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2, therefore, is confirmed. When issues were salient and the general public’s opinion coherent, public opinion had an important impact on policy-makers (e.g. in the cases of the 90-day youth employment guarantee or when raising teachers’ salaries). When issues were salient but attitudes conflicting (as in the cases of the prominent GY2011 school governance reform or in the “profits through the welfare state” debate), public opinion was important to bring the topic on the agenda, but the policy output depended solely on the respective parties in office. Finally, when salience was low, public opinion was negligible and interest groups dominated. The Swedish case study therefore offers detailed qualitative evidence for our theoretical model.

In recent years, an increasing number of countries have participated in cross-national assessments in education (CNAs), but their impact remains underexplored. We argue that CNA participation increases the capacity and motivation of policymakers to implement improvements in education through mechanisms at the elite, domestic, and transnational levels. We find evidence consistent with our propositions using an original survey of 77 education officials directly responsible for the planning and implementation of CNAs in 46 countries and personal interviews with 48 officials in target states, assessment agencies, and donor agencies.