The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory: Volume 7

A major line of argument in institutional theory, as applied to comparative education, has been that national educational arrangements, and changes in them, reflect models obtaining in world society. The models are transmitted by professionals, by all sorts of world governmental and non-governmental associations, and by the natural influences of prestige in the world's stratification system. So recent American reforms in science education, for instance, are built into the world's professional educational discourse, and policy organizations like UNESCO and the OECD and the World Bank, and flow into policy and sometimes practice in the most unlikely places.

As comparativists of education are well aware, over the second half of the 20th century there was a dramatic increase in the pace of educational expansion around the world. This revolution has made the world a schooled place both in terms of enrollment rates and increased average total years in schooling. What has been particularly noticeable is the degree to which governments in all types of nations have come to see that education plays a central role in the future development of the nation's human capital, and in turn governments have become the main providers of schooling. This alone is a significant shift from anything ever seen before the 20th century. Further this remarkable expansion of education has fostered notable homogeneity of goals, aims, and basic organizational forms of elementary and secondary schooling and, more recently, higher education.

This chapter proposes a reconceptualization of educational formalization. By formalization I broadly mean when school attendance ceases to be voluntary, and state authority is elevated over local controls. Although these twin processes tend to parallel each other, there is sufficient variation that while both conditions may obtain, countries can be located on a distribution measuring centralized to decentralized control over educational dimensions (see e.g., Baker & Letendre, 2005, p. 139). Very different social origins may indeed matter as the primary source of subsequent centralized or decentralized controls, and yet countries may adopt broadly similar forms of national authority in spite of very different social origins. The former takes the more historicist strategy, concentrating on national differences that elaborate into different organizational outcomes (see especially Vaughan & Archer, 1971; Archer, 1979). The latter argues that transnational, global forces exert defining influences on countries, producing educational patterns that are visible at the global level and are independent of national differences (see especially Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Ramirez & Boli, 1987; Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002; Werum & Baker, 2004). Nonetheless, there is no straightforward causality that links social origins to formalization, for it is clear that each strategy needs and incorporates elements of the other. At minimum, the characterization of an educational system as centralized or decentralized remains conceptually risky. This chapter suggests an alternative conceptualization that may lighten this conceptual risk, and bridge the distance between the historicist and institutional approaches to comparative educational systems.

A number of commentators have noted significant changes in the American polity over the last half century. More interest groups with more issues are active in the polity now (Dahl, 1994). There is more ideological polarization among political elites (DiMaggio, Evans, & Bryson, 1996, 2004). Participation in voluntary associations has declined among the post 1945 generations, weakening civil society (Putnam, 2000). The new organizations in the polity are more hierarchical in structure, unlike the older voluntary associations that were built on lateral ties (Skocpol, 1996, 1999). Rising education levels have produced lower voter participation rates (Brody, 1978; Nie, Junn, & Stehlik-Berry, 1996). Finally, a number of observers have noted that public opinion, constructed in part by extensive polling, has become a significant force in the polity and this has helped fuel the rise of a media centered politics (Herbst, 1993; Schudson, 1991). This is not an exhaustive list of changes that observers have noted, but it is enough to suggest that the older Tocquevillian polity and the civic culture of the U.S., portrayed so effectively by Almond and Verba (1963), have been transformed in significant ways.

Sociologists working within the institutional framework have revealed the extent to which shared cultural understandings concerning education as an institution have been a driving force effecting similar educational outcomes within diverse national settings. Worldwide models promulgated by international organizations and policy makers define and legitimate agendas, structures, and policies of nation-states as well as the movement of individuals into and through social institutions such as education, the labor market, politics, and the family. The ideological underpinnings of this overarching cultural framework have been documented and discussed extensively in theoretical as well as empirical work in this body of literature (see, e.g., Boli & Thomas, 1999; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997).

Human rights education (HRE) is a professional field and a developing curricular movement that combines work in human rights and education. A variety of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) endorse teaching human rights, an increasing number of national governments incorporate human rights content in formal school curriculum, and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the world train teachers, produce teaching manuals, and advocate for HRE in schools. While the movement dates back at least to the 1970s, in 1995 the United Nations initiated a Decade for Human Rights Education and formally defined HRE as “training, dissemination, and information efforts aimed at the building of a universal culture of human rights through the imparting of knowledge and skills and the moulding of attitudes” (United Nations, 1998, p. 3).

Private tutoring is a worldwide phenomenon, long-popular in Europe and Asia (Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Bray, 2003; Stevenson & Baker, 1992), and increasingly so in North America (Aurini, 2004; Aurini & Davies, 2004; Davies, 2004). However, this K-12 “supplementary education” or “shadow education” sector is being transformed. Until recently it has been a cottage industry of individual tutors and test prep companies, but corporate bodies are revolutionizing it around the globe. For instance, Kumon has spread from Japan to now boast 26,000 franchises in 43 countries.¹ Educate, Inc., the umbrella company for industry giant Sylvan Learning Center, currently operates 950 centers in North America, and 900 in Europe under the Schülerhilfe brand. Several franchises have expanded from their original target market of math and reading tutoring to aggressively enter new niches, including SAT/ACT prep, high school credits, online tutoring, and post-secondary programs.² These corporations are thriving in niches with relatively little competition from established public schools or non-profit institutions. The largest corporations are publicly traded and rank among top companies in business circles.

More than 80 percent of contemporary nation-states have founded educational ministries and compulsory education laws over the past two centuries (UNESCO, 2000). How modern state systems originated and have expanded is one of the classic questions of cross-national studies. A major reason, apart from structural variation that many social scientists observe, is that modern state systems are nearly universal. For instance, the structural arrangements of educational ministries and legal elements of compulsory education laws are fairly similar across nations, though the ages for free compulsory education vary and the names of educational ministries have changed over time (e.g. ministries of vocational education and training, secondary and special higher education, and adult education). The historical construction of educational ministries and laws are critical instances to illuminate the organizational reality of state action, reflecting modern state systems that have been deeply institutionalized throughout the world.¹

Education has become an important and frequently studied field for neo-institutional scholars. Undoubtedly, some of the oldest and now canonized neo-institutional works were written about education: clearly John Meyer's (1977) work on education as an institution, but also the work of Robert K. Merton (1938/1970) on early modern science. Our work here on global tertiary education intends to add to this now rich body of institutionalist literature on education on both empirical and theoretical grounds by studying cross-national trends in tertiary education.

Numerous studies in the United States have found that various forms of parental involvement in children's education positively affect children's educational outcomes such as high school dropout (McNeal, 1999; Teachman, Paasch, & Carver, 1997), post-secondary educational attainment (Sandefur, Frisco, Faulkner, & Park, 2004), and academic achievement (Epstein, 2001; Ho Sui-Chu & Willms, 1996; Muller, 1993, 1995). Researchers distinguish two dimensions of parental involvement depending on the context in which parents become involved (Downey, 2002; Ho Sui-Chu & Willms, 1996; Muller & Kerbow, 1993).¹ The first dimension of parental involvement represents what parents do at home and studies particularly have focused on the extent to which parent–child discussion on children's schooling, parenting style, and parents’ monitoring or rule-setting affect student's academic achievement and behavior. The other dimension of parental involvement includes parent participation in school activities and parent–teacher interaction. In particular, the literature has extensively examined the effects of attending parent–teacher organization (PTO) meetings or school events, and contacting teachers and school officials.

In the early 1980s, institutional and development researchers began to question why schools in different countries around the world increasingly appeared alike in formal design, organization, and function. Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer (1985) offered a seminal neo-institutional argument that schools around the world are increasingly drawn up by the global sweep of modernization. A prerequisite for any country wishing to engage with and compete in the modern world, the authors argued, is establishing a system of mass schooling based on a set of core institutional standards and values that originated in the west but have since expanded around the globe. These standards and values require that schools be universally accessible and socially progressive, capably of equally and equitably integrating a citizenry – regardless of racial, ethnic, and gender-related distinctions – into the nation-state. The world model of education described by these theorists provides not so much an organizational blueprint for building modern school systems as a cultural schema for defining the national polity and forging a modern society through education. What makes schools everywhere look and act the same, they claim, is the utter invariability of this schema.[T]he striking thing about modern mass education is that everywhere in the world the same interpretative scheme underlies the observed reality. Even in the most remote peasant villages, administrators, teachers, pupils, and parents invoke these institutional rules and struggle to construct schools that conform to them. (p. 147)

This chapter is part of a larger project that examines recent educational expansion efforts in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, a nation that provides a valuable case study of challenges shaping higher educational expansion efforts in developing countries. The initial goal of the project was to identify supply and demand issues in postsecondary training. Though we did not collect data with the intent to examine neo-institutional or status competition dynamics, this theme emerged inductively from a series of interviews conducted with individuals and focus groups, making it an ideal case study for this volume.

I suggest in this section that throughout their formation processes, Argentine and Brazilian educational systems have been subject to similar influences. However, it will also be suggested that these influences have been interpreted differently, resulting in particular patterns in each of these systems, since “Educational ideas do not just migrate; in speaking to different cultural histories and conditions they also change” (Alexander, 2000). Thus, in this section Argentine and Brazilian systems of education will be analyzed as contexts of reception and adaptation of two major international influences: Positivism and The New Education Movement.

Sociological neoinstitutional approaches indicate that nation-states follow “worldwide models constructed and propagated through global cultural and associational processes” (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997, p. 144). These worldwide-legitimate models affect every single aspect of social life, molding national policy agendas. Pushed by pressures to conform to global forces, money borrowing, and professionalized knowledge, transitional nations enact models of progress through national planning that may be inconsistent with local practice and requirements (Ramirez & Rubinson, 1979). The analysis presented in this chapter builds upon previous comparative education research by discussing one of those current models: education decentralization. This study centers around one specific aspect of recent decentralization efforts: community participation.

With some important exceptions, immigrants tend to lag behind native students in terms of educational attainment and academic achievement. Prior research has focused on two individual-level explanations for the educationally disadvantaged position of immigrant students.

Comparative education has typically focused on differences across countries and sought to explain these differences as a function of differences in historical legacies, in societal prerequisites (as in variants of functionalist analysis), or in internal patterns of competition and conflict across social classes and status groups. In these studies the independent and the dependent variables of interest are endogenous characteristics of national societies. The latter are presumed to operate mostly as “closed systems” with their past trajectories (think path dependencies) and their present states (think present system needs or current power configurations) shaping the educational outcomes of interest. These endogenous characteristics may depict properties of the economy, e.g. degree of industrialization, the polity, e.g. democratic versus authoritarian regimes, the culture, e.g. Confucian group centric versus Protestant individual oriented, etc. or the educational system itself, centralized versus decentralized. The latter, of course, may be viewed both as a dependent variable influenced by the degree to which the polity is centralized or decentralized as well as an independent variable, influencing the growth of enrollments. In the classical Collins (1979) formulation the comparatively greater growth of post-primary enrollments in the United States was an outcome of status competition which itself was made more likely by a decentralized educational system. The latter in turn reflected and was shaped by a decentralized political system.