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Are we witnessing the decline of state involvement in education or is it being reshaped, and if so how? Surprisingly, this question has received little attention from researchers in education studies, sociology and political science.
This book aims to fill this gap by exploring school evaluation policies in four European countries: England, France, Scotland and Switzerland. It shows that the same policy tool - promoted in many European and international arenas concerned with good practice in educational governance - can actually give rise in each system to a variety of policy configurations in which forms of state control can differ. Written from a policy sociology perspective, the book aims to go beyond the decline/permanence dichotomy and proposes a specific conceptual framework within which to consider both contextualised forms of state intervention and their potential similarities and combinations. By doing this, the authors not only aim to counterbalance or supplement dominant views on the Europeanisation and transnationalisation of education policies but also to imagine new possibilities for state policy analysis.
List of contents
Content: Theoretical Approach - Methodology - Contexts - Institutional Designs - Interdependencies - Europeanizations in Education. States in the Background? - Bringing the Professionals Back In? - Towards Figures of Educating States.
About the author
Hélène Buisson-Fenet is Senior Researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon and a member of the Laboratory Triangle (Political Sciences, National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS)). She works on the administrative modernisation of education and has published more broadly on the relationship between the state and the professions, particularly in the French context of New Public Management. She is currently involved with several comparative research programmes.
Xavier Pons is Associate Professor at the University of East-Paris Créteil (UPEC, France), a member of the Laboratory of Research on Governance (Largotec) and Associate Researcher in the Sociological Observatory of Change (OSC-Sciences Po, Paris). He has participated in a number of comparative research projects and has published several books and articles on evaluation and New Public Management in education, inspection bodies and experts in the policy process.
