Teacher education policy: part of the solution or part of the problem?

Abstract

Education policy makers do important work, particularly in their role as law makers. They provide the legal structures within which education functions, which includes the provision of financial resources. Viewed from this angle, one might even say that policy can perform a protective function vis-à-vis education, particularly by shielding education from domination by commercial interests or ideological agendas. Policy makers and politicians are not necessarily also policy inventors. While they do have their own agendas, and often are elected on the basis of particular ideas about or even clear promises with regard to education, they operate within a complex field of diverse interests, values, and priorities. This helps to explain why policy making is never a linear process that goes straight from a “good idea” to legislation and policy implementation. It is, at best, a struggle – not unlike the struggle for the curriculum (Kliebard, 2004) – and is as much a struggle over what counts as it is a struggle over who counts, that is, over who has a voice and who has a say. The idea that the main concern of policy makers and politicians is about securing and safeguarding public goods such as education, is a key plank in the idea of the welfare state. Whereas a significant number of countries did develop this particular societal configuration, in most cases in the decades after the Second World War, all this was fundamentally changed as a result of the rise of neo-liberal forms of governance which emerged from very specific political ideologies (such as, in the UK, Thatcherism). Neo-liberalism is often characterised as the dominance of the logic of the market, where a “small state” is mainly there to provide or ensure quality control over the market provision of “public services” (note the shift from the “public good” to “public service”). In the neo-liberal set up, the state is no longer a provider of such services and is, in theory, also no longer involved in defining which services should be “on offer,” as this is mainly seen as a matter of demand (by customers) and supply (by the market). The “in theory” is important here, however, because it could be argued that the logic of giving customers what they want actually expresses a very particular political ideology which can best be characterised as populist. And it could be argued that rather than making the political case for populism, neo-liberal governments simply let the market do this work for them, often quite “successfully.” The impact of neo-liberalism on educational policy and practice has been well documented and analysed (see, e.g., Ball, 2007, 2012; Ravitch, 2011), with a significant number of authors arguing that the logic of the market – of giving customers what they want – is fundamentally incompatible with the logic of education, where there is always the question whether what the child or student ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 2021, VOL. 49, NO. 5, 467–470 https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2021.1992926