Freshed

Have you ever thought about how polarized some debates in education are? Think about it. Whole language versus phonics. Direct versus indirect instruction. Public versus private schools. My guest today, Professor Yong Zhao, says that these polarized debates result, in part, from research studies that only look at effects – or side effects – of educational interventions. Rarely do studies acknowledge what works and what doesn’t. Yong Zhao, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas, argues that educational research should learn from medical science.

We hear about educational privatization a lot these days. My Twitter feed is filled with countless stories about how Betsy DeVos is going to privatize education in America or how Bridge International has privatized education in some African countries. Even the first three episodes of FreshEd way back in 2015 looked at how privatization has gone global. But do you really know how it’s happening, how privatization as an educational policy is moving around the world? And what effect is it having on governments? The process of national and local governments enacting policies that advance private interests in education is rather complex and often opaque to the general public. My guest today, Stephen Ball, has written a series of books looking at educational privatization. In his latest book, Edu.net, co-written with Caroline Junemann and Diego Santori, he explores through network ethnography the evolution of the global education policy community that is advancing privatization. Stephen Ball is a Distinguished

How did American universities end up being seen as the best in the world? My guest today, David Labaree, argues it was the very decentralized and autonomous structure of the higher education system that allowed universities to develop an entrepreneurial ethos that drove American higher education to become the best. Today, America’s universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world The messy structure of American higher education was not planned, however. There was no strong state or strong church directing the system from above. Rather higher education developed in a free market where survival was never guaranteed. Such a system produced unintended consequences that would make American higher education the envy of the world. David Labaree is a professor of Education at Stanford University. His new book is A Perfect Mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American Higher Educat

Today: global citizenship education. What is global citizenship education and how is it practiced? And what is the relationship between national citizenship and global citizenship? Are they compatible? My guest today is Miri Yemini, an Honorary Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Education at University College London and a Lecturer in the School of Education at Tel Aviv University She has recently published a book entitled Internationalization and Global Citizenship in Education.

We’ve talked a lot about PISA on this show. Today we take a fresh look at the test, digging into the specifics about how the test is created and what the results can tell policy makers and teachers. My guest today is Sam Sellar, a reader in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies. He has recently co-written with Greg Thompson and David Rutkowski a short book on PISA titled, The Global Education Race: Taking the measure of PISA and international assessment.

A group of Yale graduate students are protesting their labor conditions as teachers. They are demanding the administration recognize them as a union and negotiate their contract as full employees of the university. After all, graduate students teach many undergraduate classes. But the administration is stalling, waiting for Donald Trump to appoint an anti-union National Labor Relations Board that, they hope, will throw out the union’s right to exist. My guest today is Jennifer Klein, a professor of history at Yale University who has followed the unionization efforts closely. She’s written a recent New York Times op-ed detailing the events at Yale. The fight over graduate student’s right to unionize at Yale is a microcosm of the reliance on precarious work across the American higher education system. You can find the solidarity statement in support of the graduate students here.

Today we look at the globalization of curriculum markets with Professor Catherine Doherty. Catherine uses the example of the International Baccalaureate Diploma in Australia to think about the movement of global curriculum inside local markets. Why do schools choose to include global curricula like the IB? And what impact do these new curricular offerings have on educational choice both locally and globally? By looking at various schools across Australia, Catherine unpacks the social ecology of the IB, highlighting ideas about educational strategy and imagined motilities. She empirically demonstrates how the global-local binary is a historical artifact. Catherine Doherty is a Professor of Pedagogy and Social Justice in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.

Today we discuss human rights education with Monisha Bajaj. Monisha, has recently edited a book entitled Human Rights Education: Theory, Research Praxis, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of human rights education, its diverse range of practices, and the ways it has changed overtime. We also discuss the challenges to Human Rights Education today. Monisha Bajaj is a professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. Check out www.freshedpodcast.com

What’s the relationship between test scores and gross domestic product? Do higher test scores lead to higher GDP? This question may seem a bit strange because most people think about the value of education on a much smaller, less abstract scale, usually in terms of “my children” or “my education.” Will my children earn a higher wage in the future if they do well on school examinations today? If I major in engineering, will I earn a higher income than if I majored in English? The answer to these question is usually assumed to be a resounding “yes.” Doing better on examinations or studying subjects that are perceived to be more valuable will result in higher wages at the individual level and higher GDP at the national level. Such a belief shapes educational policies and influences educational decision making by families. It has even resulted in a global private tutoring industry that prepares students for tests in hopes of getting ahead. But what if this assumption isn’t true? What if the relationship betwe

I hated tests growing up. They made me feel physically ill. But we aren’t going to look at the types of tests I disliked so much, those given by a teacher to her or his students. We aren’t even going to look at standardized tests administered across one country. Instead, today’s show focuses on tests that are administered around the world. We call these types of tests international large-scale assessments. One of the most popular today is called PISA — the Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA tests 15-year-old’s scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. The latest test, in 2015, was administered in 72 countries. Think for a moment of how complex it must be to create, administer, and interpret PISA across 72 countries. The test must be reliable in different contexts; it must successfully recruit national government officials to help collect data; and it must rely on a small army of statisticians to discern what the test results actually mean. For many, the benefit of a

Have you ever visited schools like Eton College in the United Kingdom, St. Albans in the United States, or Geelong Grammar School in Australia? Maybe you were among the lucky few to have attended one. These schools are primarily reserved for children from the most privileged families, members of the 1 percent, as we would say today. The schools are steeped in tradition, covered in oak and ivy, and cost a small fortune to attend. The fees at St. Albans, for instance, run as high as $58,000 USD. For that price, it’s no wonder that these schools offer some of the best education money can buy and have produced some notable graduates. For instance, 19 prime ministers from the UK attended Eaton. Talk about a small circle! These schools, which are found worldwide, produce and sustain social class and have had to adapt to changing global and local circumstances over the decades. Many started as all boy’s schools but have since become co-educational. Others were reserved for national elites to produce competent colo

Can education be used to create peace? Can it help mend long standing issues in conflict afflicted regions? These questions don’t have easy answers, but we’ll jump into the debates surrounding them feet first. My guests today, Mieke Lopes Cardozo and Ritesh Shah, have been studying education, social transformations, and peacebuilding for the past decade and have worked and written together since 2011. They find that education has the capacity for both positive and negative outcomes. Education can certainly help resolve conflict by creating community and giving voice to under-represented groups in society. However, education can also be used as tool by ruling elites as a way to maintain their grip on power, which may sow further divisions in society. Think of it this way: imagine if a ruling party in a country decides to censor content from history textbooks that may question its power. Would that really create the conditions under which peace is possible? Or imagine if minority groups are purposefully exclu

One of the primary goals of education is to prepare youth for the labor market. This task is infinitely difficult because economies are constantly changing. What will the global labor market look like in 30 years and how will it impact specific countries? It’s impossible to know for sure, which therefore makes deciding which skills to teach inside national school systems difficult to pinpoint. It’s a major public policy question facing many governments. But there are some skills that employers want right now that they feel schools are not teaching. Plus, with the labor movement in decline worldwide, jobs have become precarious for many people. This reality requires laborers to have the grit and tenacity to be flexible in their job choices as economies change. Can schools teach these soft-skills to students? My guests today have recently co-edited a book that dives into the subject, looking at the skills deemed necessary by employers but lacking in students. The book is entitled “Bridging the Skills Gap: Inn

For the past few years, the Globalization and Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society has hosted an annual keynote address focused on cutting edge issues in the study of globalization and education. In early March at the CIES conference held in Atlanta, Fazal Rizvi gave the annual address. Fazal Rizvi is a well-known and prolific scholar on issues related to globalization, and was one of the first guests on FreshEd in 2015. He is a Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, where he joined in 2010 after being based at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he directed the Global Studies in Education program. Along with Professor Bob Lingard, who also joined FreshEd, Fazal is the author of a widely-read book, Globalizing Education Policy. His keynote address was entitled “Globalization and education after Trump and Brexit”. Following his remarks, we will hear a few words from Dr. Mario Novelli, who is Professor of Political Economy o

The field of Global Studies has a similar historical trajectory as the field of comparative education. Both fields in the American context were formalized in the 1950s during the Cold War and expanded in the 1980s when scholars “began to take note of the rapidly increasing transnational flows of people, ideas, and products, and the social, political, economic, and cultural consequences of these trends.” Both also lack a clear disciplinary home. Scholars bring myriad academic perspectives to each field, from economics to sociology and from history to anthropology. So today we explore global studies in depth in an effort for mutual learning. With me today is a leading scholar of global studies, Hilary Kahn. Hilary Kahn is the assistant dean for international education and global initiatives and director of the Center for the Study of Global Change in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. She is a co-director of the Framing the Global project, which is trying to “develop and di

Rwanda is perhaps most well-known for the genocide it experienced in the 1990s. In its post-conflict development, the country has had to balance colonial legacies, state centralizing tendencies, and the zeitgeist of neoliberalism. This has made for a careful balancing — one that has left the government regulating the society and economy while simultaneously reducing its responsibility to citizens. In education, this balancing act manifests in the government’s three aims: credentials, controls, and creativity. The education system is based on credentials awarded through examinations, a colonial hangover, and controls students as part of the state’s centralization efforts; yet, somehow, the system promotes creativity so students can pursue a learner-centered education tailored to their own needs, preparing them for the 21st century labor market of precarious work. My guest today, Catherine Honeyman, has a new book that explores Rwanda’s opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes in post-conflict development thr

The Globalization and Education Special Interest Group holds an annual book award to honor an outstanding book that addresses issues related to globalization and education. The 2016 award will be presented on March 8 to Toni Verger, Clara Fontdevila, and Adrian Zancajo for their book The privatization of education: A political economy of global education reform, which was published by Teacher College Press. The award committee praised the book for its clear-eyed and theoretically-rich contribution to the larger debate on privatization and education in the context of global education reforms. I interviewed Toni Verger about the book last year, so will replay the episode in full today. If you happen to be attending the CIES conference in Atlanta this week, please attend the Globalization and Education SIG’s keynote address on March 8 where the book award will be presented. Toni Verger is a researcher in the Department of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

A few of you have reached out to me, recommending that I ask guests about their biographies. For young scholars, it is valuable to learn from scholars with lots of experience about how they navigated the field of comparative and international education. This year FreshEd will broadcast short supplementary shows with some guests about their backgrounds and tips for young scholars. For our first installment, Joel Samoff joins me to talk about his career. Joel Samoff is Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Center for African Studies at Stanford University" I hope you enjoy this new segment and please do keep emailing me your suggestions to make FreshEd better. You can contact me anytime at will@freshedpodcast.com.

Since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, China has experienced a “Reform and Opening” period. In education, this has meant a change from an egalitarian to an elite system. Examinations emerged has the primary way of sorting students. Those who did well on various examinations rose to the next level, working their way up to higher education. This system, combining credentialism, competition, and Confucian traditions, has had profound consequences, including a rise in inequality and a growing divide between urban and rural communities. My guest today, Edward Vickers, has a new co-written book called Education and Society in Post-Mao China, detailing the past forty years in educational development. This book is the first monograph in English to offer a comprehensive analysis of China’s educational development since the death of Chairman Mao. Edward Vickers is a Professor in the department of education at Kyushu University, Japan. He specializes in education and history in East Asia.

Rui da Silva joins me today to talk about his PhD research on Portuguese Aid to Guinea-Bissau. Rui is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Minho. He is also a board member of the Centre of African Studies of the Oporto University. Guinea Bissau is a small state in West Africa that was formally colonized by Portugal. Since independence in the 1970s, the country has experienced tremendous political instability. As such, the educational development that has been undertaken in the country has been precarious. On top of this, there are many colonial legacies that make educational provision difficult. For instance, although Portuguese is the official language and language of instruction in public schools, only a handful of people in the country actually speak it. In our conversation, Rui details this history and the attempts at educational development by different organizations. He’s recently co-written articles on these topics that appear in the journals Compare and Globalisation, Societ