NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND THE REFORM OF EDUCATION by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

8

THE DISSEMINATION AND ADOPTION OF NPM IDEAS IN CATALAN EDUCATION

A cultural political economy approach

Antoni Verger and Marta Curran

Introduction

Since the 1980s, most countries in the world have experimented with New Public Management (NPM) reforms in a range of policy sectors (Hood and Peters 2004). Education, as one of the sectors of public administration with large budgets and large numbers of personnel in most countries, has been widely affected by NPM-driven reforms. As a consequence, the fragmentation of education systems in smaller units – via policies like school autonomy or parental choice – the professionalization of school management, and the logic of results-based performance have strongly penetrated into the regulation of education systems worldwide (Gunter and Forrester 2009).

To a great extent, it can be considered that NPM has become hegemonic within the global education agenda. Many countries in the world, independently of their level of economic development, cultural idiosyncrasy or the ideology of their governments, are converging around the desirability of adopting an NPM approach to educational reform (Maroy 2009). In the beginning of the eighties, in a context of economic crisis, NPM policies were basically embraced by conservative governments, usually for efficiency reasons, but also as a way to weaken public sector trade unions. However, in the nineties, these policies have also been adopted and regulated by social democratic governments, although apparently for different reasons. It has been documented that in many European countries, social-democratic parties have adopted NPM as an attempt to modernize and recover the legitimacy of the welfare state (Wiborg 2013). Catalonia is not an exception to this international trend, since the NPM reforms of education has been led by a social-democratic government. In the 2000s, a coalition of left wing parties initiated an ambitious reform process that culminated with the Catalan Education Act which put an important emphasis on emblematic NPM measures such as school autonomy, professionalization of school leadership and external evaluation.

Consequently, in relation to the four Ms presented in the Introduction, we identify that the main managerial dimensions in the structuring of the education system have been deeply altered in Catalonia, including management (through the fragmentation of the system in smaller management units under the ‘school autonomy’ rubric), managers (through the professional training of school principals and the empowerment of this figure at the school level), managing (via the introduction of new forms of standardized evaluation and outcomes-based management logics), and managerialism (by creating new hierarchies and relations of power within the education system at multiple levels). However, as we discuss in this chapter, for a combination of political, institutional and economic reasons, these NPM reforms have been enacted rather unevenly – and even contradictorily – in Catalonia.

The objective of the chapter is to explain how and why NPM policies such as those mentioned above have been adopted and enacted in the Catalan education context. The Catalan case is especially relevant due to the fact that Catalonia has pioneered the introduction of NPM reforms within the Spanish educational system, and has influenced similar reforms later introduced in other regions.

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