School Autonomy Policies and the Changing Governance of Schooling

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, but in particular since the so-called PISA shock, Germanspeaking countries have seen major changes in the governance of their school systems. This chapter aims to offer some conceptual tools for analyzing governance changes and to give some examples of research into governance changes using these concepts. The argument starts with clarifying the special conceptual view on education systems and on educational reforms provided by the governance perspective. Section "Modernization policies" continues with an overview of major educational reforms during the last two decades in German-speaking school systems and explains how they are analyzed and interpreted with the help of governance concepts. In the final parts of this chapter, the Austrian school autonomy policy, which allowed schools to develop specific "curricular profiles," is taken as an example for discussing governance changes in a multilevel governance system. Analyzing Changes in Governance What does the term governance mean? Common German parlance contains no such word, nor any equivalent. This is in fact an advantage, because it leaves room for a precise explanation. Since the late 1980s, governance has been used as a technical term in German-speaking political and social sciences to conceptualize phenomena that were previously labeled regieren (to govern) or steuern (to steer) (

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