Centralized governance frameworks in developing economies frequently generate a fundamental tension between national policy coherence and the operational responsiveness required by diverse local labor markets. In Laos, this tension is acutely manifest within the administration of Vocational Education (VE), where provincial and district authorities bear expanding implementation responsibilities without commensurate transfers of fiscal authority, administrative capacity, or technical expertise. This study critically examines the administration models operationalized within local VE governance in Laos, identifies the structural constraints limiting their effectiveness, and proposes an evidence-grounded five-component governance reform framework. Employing a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, the study integrates quantitative survey data from 781 stakeholders across all provinces, comprising local government officials, VE administrators, educators, and industry representatives, with semi-structured qualitative interviews and systematic policy document analysis. Quantitative findings reveal that administrative model typology (centralized, decentralized, hybrid) accounts for less than 2% of the variance in perceived governance effectiveness, whereas process-level governance qualities, institutional autonomy, stakeholder participation, decentralization depth, and resource adequacy jointly account for 56% of the variance in perceived suitability. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) strength emerges as the strongest predictor of institutional effectiveness. Qualitative findings illuminate the mechanisms underlying these patterns: local authorities function as pragmatic brokers, navigating structural rigidities through informal networks and discretionary project-based initiatives that remain institutionally unsustainable and inequitably distributed. The study identifies a centralization-responsiveness paradox wherein ceremonially adopted decentralization policies coexist with functionally centralized operations, generating accountability ambiguities and inequitable governance costs. Grounded analytically in institutional theory, decentralization theory, and human capital theory, the proposed framework integrates reconstituted multi-level governance architecture, institutionalized demand-side engagement, equitable financing, systematic capacity development, and rigorous performance accountability. Implications are discussed for policymakers, development partners, and VE administrators in comparable transitional economies.
Korean Comparative Education Society, Donghyun Kim, Dongyub Lee
[Purpose] This study aims to compare the structural patterns of autonomous curriculum areas in elementary schools across three East Asian countries—South Korea, China, and Japan—amidst the global trend of curriculum decentralization. Furthermore, it seeks to identify the governance dynamics between curriculum autonomy and state control as conceptualized by each nation. [Methods] Bereday’s (1964) four-step comparative methodology—description, interpretation, juxtaposition, and comparison—was applied. Focusing on South Korea’s 2022 Revised Elementary School Curriculum, China’s Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan (2022), and Japan’s Course of Study for Elementary Schools (2017), the study conducted a cross-analysis of the ideal human images and educational goals, the intensity of structural control over time allocation, and the modes of achievement standard setting, learning experience organization, and assessment and implementation support systems associated with each nation's autonomous curriculum areas. [Results] First, South Korea’s ‘School Autonomy Hour’ was identified as a ‘Radical Power Delegation Model’ of a hybrid nature, where radical temporal flexibility is granted yet operates within the constraints of administrative regulatory guidelines. Second, China’s ‘Comprehensive Practical Activities and Labor’ was found to be an ‘Instrumental Reproduction Model’ that mandates the practice of state ideology within a framework of formal decentralization. Third, Japan’s ‘Period for Integrated Studies’ was confirmed as a ‘Protected Integration Model’ that secures methodological discretion within fixed instruction hours. [Conclusion] While South Korea’s ‘School Autonomy Hour’ represents an unprecedentedly innovative attempt at decentralization, it simultaneously confronts a ‘paradox of autonomy,’ imposing significant design burdens and professional responsibilities on teachers. To prevent this initiative from devolving into institutional neglect or fragmented classroom practice, the study advocates for the systematic development of national-level modular curriculum prototypes, the expansion of principals' approval authority for previously sanctioned subjects, the restructuring of governance toward Professional Learning Communities(PLCs), and a transition from result-oriented inspection to process-centered consultative supervision systems.
Nuryadin Ali Mustofa, Agus Pahrudin, Ahmad Fauzan, Laila Maharani
This study examined global research trends in the digital transformation of educational finance and school management through a bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in the Scopus database from 2016 to 2025. Data were collected from the Scopus database on April 14, 2026, using a structured TITLE-ABS-KEY search query. The search initially identified 1,059 documents, which were refined to 162 relevant publications through PRISMA-based inclusion and exclusion criteria. Bibliometric mapping and performance analyses were conducted using Biblioshiny (R) and VOSviewer, supported by data cleaning and standardization through OpenRefine and a thesaurus file. The results showed a significant increase in global research output on digital transformation in educational finance and school management, particularly after 2020. This trend reflects growing scholarly and institutional attention to the role of digital technologies in educational governance and financial administration. Conference proceedings remained the dominant publication source, while journal publications continued to grow. China emerged as the leading contributor, supported by strong institutional productivity and collaboration networks. Thematic analysis identified major research clusters in financial management, information systems, data-driven decision-making, artificial intelligence, e-learning, and educational technology. Recent studies also emphasized sustainability, economic analysis, blockchain, and decentralized finance. This study contributes to the literature by providing a comprehensive global research map and offering policy insights to advance technology-driven, sustainable educational management practices.
University autonomy is not merely a matter of expanding institutional powers; it raises a fundamental governance question about whether the internal organizational structure is capable of exercising those powers effectively, transparently, and accountably. This article argues that organizational structure is the critical condition through which university autonomy transforms from a granted right into actual governance capacity. Drawing on cost-benefit theory, the article analyzes organizational structure in autonomous universities as a mechanism for allocating internal authority, controlling agency costs, coordination costs, compliance costs, and decision-making costs, while generating benefits in educational quality, financial transparency, and accountability. The article examines the current Vietnamese legal framework governing organizational structure in autonomous universities, evaluates the limitations of both centralized and decentralized extremes, and proposes reform directions toward a balanced model ensuring clear delegation of authority, substantive oversight, and protection of academic freedom.
This study aims to analyze and compare education financing systems in Finland, Japan, the United States, and Indonesia, with a focus on identifying key characteristics, philosophical differences, and policy implications of each model. The research employs a systematic literature review combined with comparative analysis, using management-oriented indicators including equity, efficiency, governance, and sustainability. Findings indicate that Finland implements a full public funding model emphasizing equity, Japan operates a hybrid model with high transparency, the United States exhibits significant disparities due to property-tax-based decentralization, and Indonesia remains in a transitional phase with challenges in fiscal capacity and governance accountability. The study highlights that successful education financing depends on consistent policy implementation, clear funding distribution formulas, and integrity in governance systems. The results provide actionable policy implications for improving national education financing, including the adoption of needs-based funding formulas, digitalized accountability systems, and diversified funding sources through public–private partnerships. By integrating management and governance dimensions, this study contributes to a better understanding of effective and equitable educational funding practices across diverse contexts.
Education endowment funds are increasingly promoted as sustainable financing instruments to support long-term educational development, particularly within decentralized governance systems. However, empirical evidence on how such funds are governed and implemented at the local level remains limited. This study examines the governance of the Education Endowment Fund in Bojonegoro Regency, Indonesia, focusing on the translation of policy intentions into institutional practices and school-level utilization. Drawing on qualitative data from in-depth interviews and policy document analysis, the study finds that although the fund operates within a formally structured governance framework, its implementation is characterized by centralized decision-making, compliance-oriented accountability mechanisms, and constrained local agency. Consequently, the fund is largely utilized to address short-term operational needs rather than to advance long-term sustainability objectives. The findings also reveal the importance of informal coordination and adaptive practices in navigating administrative complexity, albeit with uneven outcomes across institutions. This study contributes to debates on education financing governance by highlighting the critical role of local governance dynamics in shaping policy outcomes.
The modern educational prison has no bars. Students attend, comply, pass tests, receive diplomas — and emerge unable to use what those diplomas certify. This paper formalizes that decoupling as CM-001 (Idolatry Failure) in educational governance using the Zero Leap Theory (ZLT) framework. When the Alignment Gate (Φ) closes — through mandatory curricula, high Forced Exposure Ratios (FER), and assessment-driven instruction — the system enters an Idolatry Failure regime: the proxy (standardized scores, compliance metrics) is optimized while the structural target (transferable learning capacity, V_real) drifts. The Structural Delusion Index for Education (SDI_edu) is positive and growing. Internal metrics report success. External audit reveals divergence. This paper is the structural complement of ZLT-P15 (The Credential Standardization Trap). P15 addresses the quadrant where exit is blocked (C → 0): coercion is visible. P16 addresses the orthogonal quadrant: exit is available (C > 0), but Φ has closed. Students remain. Metrics stay green. The structural damage is invisible — precisely because assessment pressure simultaneously suppresses the behavioral signals (dropout, resistance) that would trigger correction. This is the Invisible Prison: a five-criterion observable configuration detectable with existing OECD instruments. Core empirical result: Using PISA 2022 and the OECD Survey of Adult Skills 2023 across 33 OECD countries: ρ(FER, SDI_edu) = 0.795, p < 0.0001. Higher Forced Exposure Ratio is strongly associated with greater proxy/competence decoupling. t-test high-FER vs low-FER countries: t = 4.986, p = 0.0008. Prediction 3 of ZLT-P16 confirmed. The structural triangle: South Korea presents the canonical case of sophisticated proxy/competence decoupling: top-3 PISA globally, 79% school belonging (above OECD average), but 22% life dissatisfaction (above OECD average). In the Survey of Adult Skills 2023, Korean adults (16-65) score below the OECD average in numeracy and adaptive problem-solving. Among Korean youth (16-24), literacy is above OECD average, but adaptive problem-solving falls below — the structural signature of compliance-type learning: succeeds where assessment trains, fails specifically on transfer competence. Finland is the proof-of-concept: comparable proxy outcomes, SDI_edu near zero, adult skills above OECD average across all three domains including youth 16-24. Two core corollaries derived from CM-001/P75 and I-3/P_SYNTH: P16.C1 (Alignment-Divergence): when Φ < Φ_min, SDI_edu grows monotonically — proxy improves while ρ(proxy, V_real) declines. P16.C2 (Invisible Acquiescence): the conditions that close Φ simultaneously suppress the behavioral signals that would alert the system to its own failure. The prison self-conceals. New constructs: SDI_edu three-layer audit family (SDI-1 within-system, SDI-2 young-adult orthogonal, SDI-3 long-run structural); Compliance Cascade Onset Point (CCOP); Invisible Prison as five-criterion observable state; IAS-CUR v2.1 audit standard; Attribution Inversion Principle (P16.AIP). This Zenodo record includes: ZLT_P16_v2_2_zenodo.pdf — full paper (14 pages, DOI embedded) ZLT_P16_v2_2.docx — Word source ZLT_P16_v2_1_with_appendices.docx — version with embedded figures and Appendices D–F zlt_cur_audit.py — IAS-CUR v2.1 executable audit tool (4/4 canonical tests passing; run: python zlt_cur_audit.py --test) zlt_p16_phase_diagram.py — Phase Diagram Suite: FER vs SDI_edu for 33 OECD countries (run: python zlt_p16_phase_diagram.py) zlt_p16_knowledge_decay.py — Knowledge Decay Index (KDI) exploratory tool with honest null result zlt_p16_ias_cur_interactive.html — IAS-CUR v2.1 interactive browser-based audit (open in any browser, no server needed) 9 companion PNG figures (phase diagram suite + KDI suite) All scripts run in Google Colab without API keys or external downloads. No authentication required. Part of the Zero Leap Theory (ZLT) series. Upstream: ZLT-P75 (CM-001 / doi:10.5281/zenodo.18940742), ZLT-P_SYNTH (I-3, OD-1 / doi:10.5281/zenodo.19498184), ZLT-P15 (structural complement / doi:10.5281/zenodo.18344309). Series root: doi:10.5281/zenodo.18264279. v2.2 changelog: Corrects empirical overclaim on Korea 16-24 youth data present in v2.1. Accurate data per OECD Survey of Adult Skills 2023: literacy above OECD average, numeracy near average, adaptive problem-solving below OECD average. Domain-specific decoupling framing (compliance-type learning fails specifically on transfer competence) replaces the v2.1 maximal claim. Theory, structure, and all other empirical claims unchanged. Companion tools added in this version.
Educational inequality persists across ASEAN despite improvements in enrollment and literacy, reflecting structural rather than merely access-related challenges. This study examines how governance structures, financing mechanisms, institutional capacity, and socio-economic stratification interact to produce disparities in educational access, participation, and progression. Using a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods design with cross-national comparative policy analysis, the research integrates macro-level quantitative indicators with in-depth qualitative evaluation of policy frameworks across ASEAN member states. Findings reveal that while primary enrollment approaches universality, secondary and tertiary education exhibit pronounced attrition, particularly among rural, low-income, and minority populations. Centralized governance, equitable public financing, and targeted support correlate with higher retention and reduced disparities, as evidenced in high-performing systems such as Singapore, whereas decentralized or under-resourced systems exacerbate structural inequities. Moreover, digital access and institutional capacity emerge as critical factors influencing educational trajectories. The study underscores that addressing inequality requires systemic reforms integrating governance coordination, progressive financing, institutional strengthening, and equity-focused interventions. By foregrounding structural determinants and cross-national variation, this research contributes to theoretical and policy debates on educational equity, providing evidence-based guidance for ASEAN strategies aimed at achieving inclusive, high-quality education across diverse socio-economic and geographic contexts.
From July 1, 2025, Vietnam will replace its three-tier local government structure with a two-tier model, raising questions about how far legal decentralization can deliver more inclusive and collaborative governance in key sectors such as education. This article uses doctrinal legal analysis to examine the constitutional, organization- al, and fiscal architecture of the reform, focusing on the education decentralization decrees issued by the government. It asks how the two-tier model reallocates powers across the center, province, and commune, whether finance, performance indicators, and data governance rules are aligned with subsidiarity, fiscal equivalence, and trans- parent multilevel coordination, and which combinations of rules create a real scope for collaboration. The analysis finds that inclusive collaboration is most likely where devolved mandates are matched by predictable, equalized funding, clearly specified Education Management Information System (EMIS)-based information flows, and enforceable participation procedures, while ambiguous oversight clauses and frag- mented data systems risk precautionary recentralization, especially in capacity-con- strained provinces. The article concludes by proposing doctrinal benchmarks and a phased implementation roadmap to help policymakers translate the two-tier reform from formal devolution into operational collaboration in the education sector.
This comparative study investigates China’s policy reform waves alongside global education trends, analyzing 334 central-level policy documents published by the National People’s Congress, State Council, and Ministry of Education between 1979 and 2023. The study identifies three waves: enhancing access (1979–1990), improving quality and accountability (1991–2010), and enforcing equity (2011–2023). Even though the decentralization of finance and administration of education led, a few years later, to equity and quality concerns, several key differences to global reform trends remained: decentralization did not lead to deregulation; outcomes-based regulation complemented but did not replace input-based regulation; equity remained central, especially in the final reform wave.
In educational psychology, emphasizing the situational context is clearly ‘du jour’, becoming arguably most apparent in the renaming of Eccles' Expectancy Value Model to ‘Situated Expectancy-value Model’ (SEVT), outlined in several papers she coauthored (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020, 2024; Gladstone et al., 2022). According to Eccles and Wigfield (2024), the programmatic shift was necessary to reflect the expansion of the theory since its beginnings as a framework to explain gender differences in learning motivation and educational choices of students, to a now full-fledged socio-cognitive developmental theory. As such, the model is explicit about the recursive nature of the underlying processes and acknowledges the idiosyncratic circumstances of each behavioural moment, be it students' decision what classes to take or a teacher's decision about the feedback they give each student. While this makes a lot of sense conceptually, the new framing of the model comes with two challenges. One is of epistemological nature, related to the fact that the emphasis of the ‘situatedness’ weakens the generalizability of empirical finding to other, even very similar contexts. The second challenge lies in the translation of the expanded model to adequate empirical research strategies that reflect the new model complexity or, put more simply: How do we overcome the limitations of questionnaires as the most commonly used tool to collect data in this line of research? It feels inadequate now to pack the ‘situatedness’ in the item stem, for example, ‘When doing your math homework…’ or ‘In general, I love being a science teacher’. This might logically make the response somewhat context-specific, but situation-specific enough in the sense of SEVT. Overcoming this limitation is the common theme throughout the six papers which, each in its unique way, are pushing towards a more convincing empirical approach to illustrate and understand the relevance of the situational context and to identify aspects of it that allow us to carefully generalize findings to a similar class of situations. The latter is important as ‘situatedness’ in the SEVT model is not meant to be merely a new label for otherwise unexplained variance in an analysis that uses stable teacher and student characteristics as predictors. Instead, it suggests characterizing the context in order to integrate relevant features into a predictive model. For example, Stark, Camburn & Kaler (this volume) demonstrate that teacher motivation varies across different but typical work activities. But instead of the ‘classic approach’ to rely on item construction for a cross-sectional study (‘When I teach in the classroom…’, ‘When I interact with colleagues…’, ‘When I grade papers…’, etc.), they use the ‘day reconstruction method’ (DRM) to get not only a more valid measurement of the motivational state of teachers in a given context but also a precise account of how often teachers encounter those qualitatively different, but nevertheless typical, professional situations. It is obvious that a teacher's motivational state during actual teaching is not predictive of their long-term experience of burnout, for example, if this context represents only a small fraction of the professional contexts a teacher navigates on a daily basis. They are able to demonstrate that roughly two thirds of the variance in teacher motivation lies between periods, that is, distinct situations throughout a workday, negligible variance between days (controlling for periods) and roughly a third of the variance resides (stably) between teachers. Wang, Thompson-Lee and Klassen (this volume) combine the emphasis on ‘situatedness’ with the advances made in classroom simulations as a tool for teacher training, which is steadily moving towards the use of virtual reality as a standard tool (see Huang et al., 2023). Wang et al. demonstrate that even in the reduced complexity setting of a simulation in an online training setting, the success in adequately reacting in a set of 15 situations a teacher typically encounters on a daily basis has a consistent impact on student teachers self-efficacy beliefs and their assessment of how good they see themselves aligned with the affordances of the job. Unintentionally, the exposure to the scenarios tends to have a somewhat sobering effect since self-efficacy and career intentions trended down on average. However, one could argue that this is reflective of a more accurate self-assessment of the students regarding their readiness to be a teacher. They can take this either as a call to intensify their learning efforts or as a critical appraisal of their decision to become a teacher. As long as the 15 scenarios authentically reflect the professional life of a teacher, this study implicitly reflects the situational variability of the profession, and one is invited to speculate how this might impact a teacher's motivation in the long run. Similar to Stark, Camburn and Kaler (this volume), Bross, Frenzel and Nett (this volume) consider ‘day’ the key temporal unit of observation for a longitudinal study on teacher motivation or, in this case, the emotion regulation of teachers. Emotion regulation is strongly related to teacher motivation as successful regulation of negative emotions an important predictor of maintained teacher motivation is (Wang et al., 2023). The interesting twist in their study is the use of latent profile analysis that allows them, in addition to identifying coping patterns for two emotions in different situational settings, to reveal flexibility/consistency of teachers' emotion regulation across situations as a trait-like characteristic. Even if the authors do not discuss this explicitly, their approach introduces an interesting expansion of the SEVT model: While it is true that situations matter for the response of teachers, only some teachers actually vary in their response to negative emotions while the majority of teachers show very similar emotion regulation patterns. This could be understood as a situation by person interaction: Only 17.4% of the teacher sample used different combinations of flexibility across situations. The approach also reveals that the remaining three patterns consist of teachers who differ in their coping profiles but not across situations. This opens the door for further investigation beyond the emotion regulation research because it is conceivable that similar ‘meta patterns’, that is, stability of different patterns across situations for some teachers but not for others, exist for other motivational constructs as well. Moving to the papers that focus on the instructional process, we again see the need to resort to more complex statistical tools if ‘situatedness’ is of particular interest. Oschwald, Moeller, Kracke, Viljaranta and Dietrich (this volume) present probably the most fine-grained analysis of ‘situatedness’ in the context of motivational research to date, analysing the ‘micro-cycles’ of instructional quality on college students motivation in 9-min intervals (combining three ratings of 3 min). The basic idea was to illustrate that change/variation in the instructional clarity (detail, variation, consistency) has an immediate/short-term lag effect on student motivation. While the authors are very circumspect in considering methodological and conceptual shortcomings of their Null findings, I am more inclined to take them at face value: Motivational dispositions of students, as conceptualized in the SEVT context, are more inert than the study design implies. If this is true, it is good news for future research in the sense that it is not necessary to choose such a high-resolution (and hence expensive) research design. Most likely, a low-clarity teaching style simply does not dampen college students motivation immediately and maybe not even from 1 day to the next. However, if a teacher consistently over days and weeks teaches with low clarity, students become gradually frustrated, start to question their own competence, etc. The idea that zooming out the time-frame somewhat is corroborated by the Rubach and von Keyserlink paper (this volume) which used 5 weeks within the semester as the elapsed time to investigate longitudinal trends. The consistency of the student assessment of the quality of the instruction dominated observation specificity when the course was held constant. However, at a given time point, students rated different courses differently, suggesting that their assessment reflected substantial differences in their perception of the different courses. Also important is their finding that roughly 30% of variance is a stable difference between students who adds substantial noise to any statistical analysis that aims at identifying causal impact over time. Accordingly, Rubach and von Keyserlink acknowledge that their study is limited as it is a single source study, that is, students rated the instructional quality as well as their interest and expectations. But that consistency of instructional quality throughout the semester is a limiting factor to demonstrate ‘situatedness’ of student motivation comes from other research contexts as well, for example, the research on the often replicated ‘thin-slice-effect’ (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993): Student evaluations at the end of the semester can be extremely well predicted by the assessment of the first 10 min of the first lecture of the semester. While this is often taken as proof of the importance of the first impression, our own (experimental) research suggests that this high correlation is mainly due to the consistency of teacher behaviour throughout the semester (Samudra et al., 2016). The first impression is a good indicator of the teaching quality for the teacher's behaviour/quality of the rest of the semester. A final course evaluation may well be more or less an accurate average of the experience throughout the semester and therefore a valid measure of instructional quality. With the caveat that student assessment and student motivation are different constructs, this observation would suggest for the Oschwald et al. study that the authors would find more robust effects if the time unit was not 9-min intervals, but daily or weekly aggregates of instructional quality. For both, the Oschwald et al. as well as the Rubach and von Keyserlink study, the measurement of instructional quality becomes a critical issue when we want to avoid artefacts of common-source bias or too short-cycled causal models. Göllner, Lazarides and Stark (this volume) make a foray into new territory by exploring the validity of large language models (LLMs) to assess teaching quality which, in the future, could eliminate the human factor in coding entirely. If a holistic semantic analysis could be able to capture relevant aspects of teaching quality reliably, human coding through expert or student assessment would become obsolete. Quality could even be assessed in real time as the teaching is still happening or shortly thereafter, opening the opportunity to use it as immediate feedback in teacher training. In a more rudimentary fashion, we used the same idea for specific teacher training purposes a decade ago. A voice-recording device (LENA) that distinguished teachers' and students' speaking turns identified in-class discourse segments the teachers were learning to use more frequently in their mathematics classes. Teachers received feedback within 24 h, and for some (not all), it was helpful for improving their teaching (Wang et al., 2014). Göllner et al.'s cutting-edge exploratory study shows that LLMs have potential in this regard, but we have still ways to go. The semantic representations are ‘sensitive enough’ to reflect variation between segments, lessons and teacher. They also were associated with human-coded quality assessment, but a ballpark 20% of shared variance is not even close to the level where the human–AI interrater reliability could reach the level of human–human reliability after efficient coder training. However, they used a zero-shot GPT model which mean that no additional information was provided to guide the semantic analysis, and the PCA-based dimensionality reduction is indicative of the exploratory nature of the approach with its inherent difficulty to interpret the dimensions and questions of replicability. However, the prompted transcript analysis is a first step towards a use of LLMs that is closer aligned with theoretical concepts and hence a promising step to the next level. After all, the LLM can identify the strength of instructional dialogue best when it can use samples of human-identified examples of dialogue that represent the quality dimension in question (multi-shot GPT). There is no doubt that LLMs will in the near future take over a lot of (if not all) coding tasks of texts and video footage. But what and how the AI codes material will always depend on theoretical considerations about student–teacher and student–student interactions and how they facilitate academic learning. The tool does not come with a guiding theory and Göllner et al.'s contribution makes that clear. In her reflections on the situative approach to research in educational psychology, Nolen (2024) points out that the situative view leads to an emphasis on understanding the processes that underlie change. This, in turn, leads to a reflection on what kind of change is to be analysed and what kind of change is considered desirable. Academic learning in educational psychology is, for the most part, conceptualized as a cumulative process, as relatively stable gains over an observed time period, adding to the prior knowledge level. Weeks or months as temporal units of analysis seem appropriate as standard in the learning context of curriculum-based schooling, unless the learning of smaller units is the focus, like learning the content of one particular mathematics lesson. In contrast, the underlying idea in the Stark, Camburn and Kaler contribution on teacher motivation is that high teacher motivation is desirable and a potential goal for interventions. Or it stimulates a teacher's self-directed action by minimizing exposure to situations that are demotivating or to change the quality of the social interactions to avoid the demotivating impact. It is not a cumulative, but rather a protective change model. At least implicitly, the self-efficacy belief of student teachers in Wang, Thompson-Lee and Klassen similarly is a variable one would wish to be and remain high, based on the normative assumption that high self-efficacy beliefs are a characteristic of a good teacher. But different from academic learning, there is a logical ceiling for self-efficacy beliefs. Therefore, it is not a cumulative change model, but an optimization model. The environment should lead teacher to—and keep them at—a ‘5 out of 5’ level of self-efficacy. While those two papers have similar underlying change models, the theory of emotion regulation in Bross, Frenzel and Nett is based on a qualitatively different conceptualization of change: homeostasis. For a teacher, anger is arguably a dysfunctional state and it is desirable to quickly and effectively regulate it down to an emotional set point if the situational trigger cannot be avoided. It is apparent that the logical temporal unit of analysis in this context is probably minutes, if the goal is to investigate the process as such. This, of course, is not the intention of the authors as their focus lies on the coping patterns of teachers across situations encountered throughout the day. The assumption is, in fact, cumulative in the sense that exposure to a lot of anger-inducing situations paired with a suboptimal coping pattern will wear teachers down in the long run and reduce their professional motivation. The intention of the Oschwald et al. study was to demonstrate that instructional clarity has an immediate positive impact on college students learning motivation—again not as a cumulative model but with the normative goal to reach and maintain a high level of learning motivation. At least implicitly, the assumption is that a somewhat consistent lack of clarity over a longer period of time, that is, not 9 min but several weeks of low-clarity instruction, will wear a student's learning motivation down. Even if the short-term lag effect could not be shown, the long-term effect might still—and it is likely to—exist. The measurement used in the Rubach and von Keyserlink study is Likert-scale based, which means that it comes with a maximal value despite the fact that theoretically, at least, interest is logically unlimited and could therefore follow a cumulative model. If the quality of the instruction is extremely high every week I am in class, my interest might continuously grow until the end of the term. I might reach the scale's ceiling, but that would be an artefact of the measurement scale. Why are these considerations important? They identify the epistemological challenge of an overly situation-focused perspective. While it might be relevant in some research contexts to understand features of the situation and not treat it as error variance (Nolen, 2024), we will still need to transcend the insights gained from these analyses to a more general level in order to be of educational relevance. At least for the run-of-the-mill K-12 schooling context, it would be difficult to drop the traditional positivistic rationale when we consider the practical relevance of our research: Once causal mechanisms are identified as tentative truths, they are of practical relevance only if they show long-term impact on academic learning and psychosocial development across a fairly broad class of situational contexts. The more specific the context is defined in the research, the more limited the practical implications. For example, it might be of psychological interest to demonstrate that a student's academic self-concept dips down after 20 instances of unclear instruction. But if the teacher simply was underprepared on that day and otherwise presented the material clearly and accessibly throughout the semester, treating this as a random ‘error’ is probably justified. When long-term development is the main focus of our research (here motivation), the minute-to-minute fluctuations in the clarity of instructions are unlikely to be important. The reason is that, in the back of our heads, we have a model of how motivation affects learning. A student who is—more or less—stably interested in the content of the class will be more likely to work happily on assignments, etc. in the evening and on weekends. As a general rule (non-situative), research has shown that unclear instruction has a negative impact on self-concept and interest in the long run, and we assume that this is true for a broad array of situations, student characteristics, grade levels, etc. This is why it is reasonable that teacher training works with student teachers on instructional clarity as a skill set. If well, across a of situations and contexts a teacher will Even if we that every situation is different and mechanisms are ‘situatedness’ cannot mean that educational psychology, as an of the long-term developmental that are the of educational It means to be more to of the learning environment that are necessary for the impact of on learning means to acknowledge the of but this becomes a only if the goal is to identify situational characteristics that allow The Stark, Camburn and Kaler paper a for this idea because their the teachers themselves to identify situations and their over time and how they in those contexts. While every with other teachers might be different from the they as a features that with other situations in the daily professional for example, actual instruction in the on the situations we on a daily basis to be a good point to ‘situatedness’ into a research that does not of the focus of our process of learning in
This comparative policy analysis examines the education systems of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—East Asia’s “Asian Tigers”—focusing on their historical development, philosophies, objectives, structures, financing, administration, and teacher policies. Utilizing Bereday’s (1964) comparative method, the study synthesizes secondary sources, including government reports and academic journals, to explore how these nations leverage education for economic and social progress within distinct political and cultural contexts. South Korea’s system emphasizes fierce competition and STEM excellence, driven by high-stakes exams like the CSAT, yet grapples with equity issues due to private tutoring prevalence. Taiwan prioritizes holistic development, bilingualism, and a 12-year compulsory framework, fostering inclusivity but facing rural-urban disparities. Singapore champions meritocracy, aligning its streamlined 6-4-2 structure with economic needs through early streaming and robust public funding, though it risks rigidity. Commonalities include centralized governance, rigorous academic standards, and public-private partnerships, while differences in financing and decentralization reflect contextual priorities. The findings highlight policy coherence as a driver of educational success, offering lessons for developing nations like Ethiopia, such as investing in teacher quality, early education, and equitable access. This study underscores the transformative potential of education when aligned with national goals, providing actionable insights for global education reform in an interconnected world.
The RISE (Research on Improving Systems of Education) Programme political economy team focused on “adoption” (PET-A) examines the political conditions required to put learning at the center of an education system. This work stream has produced 12 historical case studies and three synthesis papers which draw on this rich material. This paper is part of the latter effort and offers a comparative analysis across five of the countries with RISE Country Research Teams (Ethiopia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Vietnam), as well as additional case studies focusing on Chile and Peru. Building on the RISE systems framework (Pritchett, 2015), our political economy analysis incorporates issues of competing interests, power, and political strategy. We focus on the promoters and blockers of learning-oriented education reform and their respective powers and strategies to parse out the political contestations that are endemic to the reform processes that impact system coherence around learning. In this paper, we present a binding constraints framework to explore what a politics for learning might look like and examine areas of intervention that present critical bottlenecks impeding a country’s ability to deliver learning outcomes which, if addressed, pose the potential for large impact relative to other constraints. We draw upon the PET-A country case studies to include analysis of different factions and reform champions within government, including but not limited to the executive office (president/prime minister), Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education, competing ministries, decentralized government levels, and local leaders. In doing, we elucidate how politics permeate nearly all accountability relationships in education systems and the likelihood that any given program will positively impact learning.
International research on adult education systems reaches certain limitations when explaining differences between and within countries. Often, research within the multilevel system of adult education examines issues located at the macro-level, meaning policy and legal frameworks, and at the micro-level, dealing with impacts on learners. This article focuses on the meso-level of adult education in two sample countries, referring to providers and their educational offers of publicly financed basic and community education. Guided by the theoretical approaches of educational governance and neo-institutionalism, we identify governance regimes and organizational fields and analyze the impacts of legal and financial regulation on providers and their provision. Based on document review and expert interviews, relations at the national and regional levels are analyzed. We find a decentralized system supporting the regional provision of basic adult education in Spain and a mixture of national and regional regulations leading to regional provision based on learners’ needs in England.
Abstract This article examines how self-managed faculties in socialist Yugoslavia adopted market mechanisms in the 1970s and 1980s to attract international students and thus contributed to a commercialization of higher education. In the 1950s, Yugoslavia became a destination for students from postcolonial states because of its nonaligned politics. While Yugoslav officials first emphasized aid to students through scholarships, this article argues that projects based on profit seeking began to dominate thinking about aid in the late 1960s. Using archival records in Croatia and Serbia as well as UNESCO and World Bank reports, this article shows how domestic and international factors influenced these changes. Domestically, decentralizing political reforms and decreased funding for higher education allowed republic policy makers to disconnect technical aid from political priorities and to pursue self-financing international students. Detached from centralized policy making, Yugoslav university and republic leaderships, primarily in SR Croatia and SR Serbia, chose the immediate profits of international students over long-term investments in scholarship students. Internationally, reforms promoted by UNESCO and the World Bank shifted aid away from university training abroad to vocational training in situ. These new policies complemented an emerging international division of labor suited more to the economic interests of OECD states and multinational corporations than developing states.
Educational systems around the world have undergone major reforms since the 1980s, with largely disappointing results. The objective of this paper is to understand the reasons behind the lackluster results with the purpose of devising ways to address them. Analysis in the paper is based on the understanding that the education sector is characterized by distinct functional imperatives that need to be addressed in policy responses that must involve a wide array of actors to be effective. In this view, education policy is fundamentally about establishing a governance structure to ensure that all the essential functions necessary to achieve the chosen policy goals are performed. Accordingly, the paper proposes a governance framework for education comprising political and operational functions, which it then applies to education policy reforms in the Philippines since the 1970s. The analysis finds that the reforms have focused on financing and decentralization issues while overlooking many other critical governance functions. The lackluster results are unsurprising given that the sector has been beset by many problems unrelated to centralized bureaucratic administration and which have been left unattended. The conclusions regarding the importance of comprehensive governance to emerge from this study are relevant not only for understanding education policy reforms in the Philippines and elsewhere but will also help develop a fuller understanding of the functioning of the education sector in general.
Symbolic of the rise of neoliberal principles in Irish education policy, there is now a move towards advancing school autonomy and decentralizing decision-making to individual schools, possibly emulating the academy model that has become widespread in England. Increasing the freedom and independence of schools may involve using private actors to provide what has traditionally been the service of the state, but it will most definitely involve schools behaving more like private sector organizations. While some of the new powers that would be devolved to schools might seem attractive, especially in how they are presented at an official level, this paper highlights how features of autonomous schools that may initially seem appealing are, in practice, likely to be unsuited to the Irish context. In this regard, this paper advises that school autonomy should not be advanced in Ireland.
This article examines how teachers in post‐coup Honduras approached implementing neoliberal school finance reforms with which they disagreed. The laws in question decentralize national public education and demand that teachers secure funding for basic school infrastructure and academic programs from private businesses. I show how teachers reluctantly engaged aspects of this legislation, but for their own reasons, and suggest that their partial compliance is illuminative of how teachers in other contexts may approach policy implementation.
Different stages of development of African higher education,former colonial,colonial,independent and globalization period,displays a prominent character of dependence on Occident.Economic globalization and internationalization of higher education have a far-reaching effect on higher education in Africa.On the one hand, the wave of globalization led by neo-liberalism promotes the development of higher education in Africa,which also leads to the privatization and decentralization of it;on the other hand,the insufficiency of educational finance makes the its dependency on international aid increases,which challenges the dominions and independence of higher education.Therefore,neo-liberalism hinders the localization of higher education in Africa.In the context of globalization,Africa nations try to interact between globalization and localization of higher education,and build the system of outcome-based higher education.
José Francisco da Silva Neto, Guiomar de Oliveira Passos
It examines the meanings defined in the creation of the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology, it is inquiring about its direction and established organizational mechanism to achieve it. The procedure is a political appraisement of this transformation, based on Figueiredo and Figueiredo (1986) and Arretche (1998) and making use of legislation and government plans founders, analyzed by content type “inductive-constructive”. It was found that the Institutes are dedicated to the development understood as much as economic stability, the central “restrictive institutional convention”, as income generation opportunities, indicator of the “neo-developmentalist convention.” The medium for this is, mainly, the provision of professional education courses and toplevel defined as the potential local and regional decentralized units of autonomous organizations. Thus, what drives the creation of Institutes is the link between qualification of handiwork and development, now anchored in the idea of growing productivity and attitudes such as entrepreneurship and cooperative system.
In mid 1997, Indonesia was seriously affected by the Asian economic crisis. This quickly spread into monetary, political, and social crises. Following a new presidential appointment, pressures and demands from the grass-roots to reform government systems become stronger and more persistent. Several provinces, particularly those having rich natural resources, pressed for greater autonomy. They felt that their natural resources were being taken by the central government but only a small part came back to them. If the central government did not respond to their pressures and demands, they threatened to proclaim independence from Indonesia. <br><br>Education in Indonesia has been a decentralized system since the issuance of Law Number 22/1999 on Local Government. This law was reviewed in 2004 and became Law Number 32/2004 on Local Government. The essence of Law Number 22/1999 was that education was devolved mostly to local government which in Indonesia is at the district level. As a consequence, education was no longer dominated by the central government; local government had voices in policy, planning, management, finance and delivery of education. Law Number 32/2004 revised some earlier decisions and provided more authority to Provinces. <br><br>Despite an initial impression that the Ministry of National Education (MONE) has real power, its reach is limited and constrained by political and bureaucratic structures and the capacity of those working in the system at all levels. It is worth noting that the MONE’s role is rendered even more complex by the fact that education in Indonesia falls under three ministries: MONE, Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA) and Ministry of Religious Affairs (MORA). While MONE has the responsibility for coordinating education, each ministry has its own political and administrative agenda and processes, complicating the already complex and demanding tasks associated with decentralization. <br><br>Implementation of education decentralization in Indonesia is not easy because of its political dynamics and geographic and administrative complexity. The dynamics and complexity of Indonesia can be seen in its demography – population size and variations in density and ethnicity, and its geography – the 13,000 islands causing serious communication problems. From the political perspective, issues such as bureaucratic complexity, complex processes of decentralization due to it being driven by political and donor forces, and implementation complexity involving a range of actors and arenas have also contributed to the challenges. From the administrative view point, the challenges included rapid implementation (big bang), simultaneous political, administrative, and fiscal decentralization, and delays in establishing legal frameworks stipulating the divisions of obligatory functions between central, provincial, and district levels. In addition, the lack of capacity amongst local managers to do their jobs created real problems at the district level. <br><br>Decentralization of education in Indonesia has brought a lot of changes and one of the most important of them is community participation in education. The community must now take part in the quality improvement of educational services, which includes planning, monitoring, and evaluation of educational programs through Boards of Education.<br>