Policy learning in Norwegian school reform: a social network analysis of the 2020 incremental reform

Abstract

This policy study examines how policymakers and policy experts in Norway made us of research and studiesproduced in Norway, in the Nordic countries and outside the Nordic regionto explain the 2020 incremental school reform. In total, 2 White Papers, 12 Green Papers and 3438 texts, cited in the White and Green Papers, were used as data for the text-based social network analysis. The three major findings were the following: First, the policymakers and experts make excessive use of references (on average, 246 references per White or Green Paper). The publications they cite are highly specialized and issue centred with little overlap between the various papers. Second, the policy references for the 2020 reform were mainly domestic. Approximately 70% of the referenced texts were published in Norway. Finally, the social network analysis enabled the authors to identify five texts that were influential and that bridged curriculum with quality monitoring reform topics. The authors suggest that more attention should be paid to an analysis of incremental reforms such as the 2020 reform in Norway. They identify a few of the blind spots that the more commonly used focus on fundamental reforms tends to produce.

Think tanks, policy networks and education governance: The rising of new intra-national spaces of policy in Portugal

“…The focus on the new forms of education governance and acknowledgement of the growing importance of new actors from multiple sectors, operating on multiple scales, has led us to adopt network ethnography (Hogan, 2016) as the methodological backdrop to this study. The empirical analysis was in line with recent educational policy studies that resort to traditional ethnographic methods and data collection techniques, such as documentary analysis, interviewing and social network analysis (see, for instance, Baek et al, 2018;Ball, 2016;Shiroma, 2014). This type of methodology was chosen in an attempt to combine different techniques and tools in order to collect, capture and analyse the presence and huge amount of content available and the "organizational forms built around new media" (Howard, 2002, p. 550).…”

Policy of suspiciousness –mobilization of educational reforms in Sweden

“…Both reports contain bibliographies-that is, references to different knowledge and information sources utilized by the authors of the policy documents. First, all references in both documents were documented and categorized into three groups: domestic, international, and Nordic (see Baek et al, 2017). Second, all references were coded by the type of document: governmental, academic, report, etc.…”

“…Lingard & Lewis, 2017;Priestley & Biesta, 2013;Takayama, 2018). There is also an emerging research field studying the kind of knowledge references that are actually used to substantiate arguments for proposed school reforms (Baek et al, 2017;Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). This article aims to contribute to this latter research field by exploring the textual references used and discourses formed to substantiate school reform in Sweden through cooperation with the OECD.…”

Externalisation and structural coupling: Applications in comparative policy studies in education

“…Second, our bibliometric analysis of the 2006 reform indicates that both the Ministry of Education and Research and its appointed NOUs apparently feel compelled to substantiate their policy decisions and policy recommendations, respectively, with ample evidence, as manifested in the long list of references published in the White and Green Papers. In every reform period (reforms of 1996, 2006 and 2020), the number of references drastically increased (Baek et al, 2018;Steiner-Khamsi et al, 2019). The White and Green Papers prepared for the 2020 period more than doubled their use of references compared to the previous reform period.…”