New public management as a global education policy: its adoption and re-contextualization in a southern european setting

In the education sector, new public management (NPM) has crystallized in policies such as school autonomy, professionalization of school principals, standardized evaluation and teachers’ accountability, and it has been widely disseminated by international organizations, such as the OECD, which enjoy...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Verger, Antoni, Currán Fábregas, Marta
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2014
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/97609
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/97609
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:37.014
37.015.4
37.012
37.013
371.214
Comparative and international education
Discourse analysis/semiotics
Educational leadership and management
Educational policy
Globalization and internationalization
Política educativa
Organización escolar
Legislación educativa
Pedagogía
Sociología de la educación (Educación)
5802.02 Organización y Dirección de las Instituciones Educativas
5801.04 Teorías Educativas
5802 Organización y Planificación de la Educación
Descripción
Sumario:In the education sector, new public management (NPM) has crystallized in policies such as school autonomy, professionalization of school principals, standardized evaluation and teachers’ accountability, and it has been widely disseminated by international organizations, such as the OECD, which enjoy a great prestige when it comes to frame education reforms in European countries. This article analyses the way NPM has been constructed as a global education policy, and its adoption and re-contextualization into the Spanish education context. This article shows that the reasons for adopting NPM are not so different from those prevailing in other countries where these policies have been implemented before. Counter-intuitively, although NPM is a reform programme traditionally initiated by conservative governments, in the Spanish education field, as also happened in other Central and Northern European countries, it has been adopted and regulated with social democratic governments. In all these countries, social democrats have tended to embrace NPM as an attempt to address the legitimacy crisis of the welfare state and of public services in particular. Nonetheless, in Spain, the NPM reforms have been re-contextualized and regulated in very uneven and paradoxical ways. For a combination of political, institutional and economic reasons, the final form adopted by the NPM approach is far from the model advocated by the international community and is deeply contradictory. Our arguments are based on intensive fieldwork that include, on the one hand, interviews with key education policy-makers and stakeholders and, on the other, document analysis of policy briefings, press releases and legal documents.