Understanding comprehensive school reforms: Insights from comparative-historical sociology and power resources theory

Abstract

The historical origins and development of comprehensive schooling have seldom been analyzed systematically and comparatively. However, there is a rich comparative and historically grounded literature on the development of welfare states, which focuses on many relevant policies, but ignores the education system. In particular, the power resources approach applied by many welfare state scholars has been continuously elaborated and refined in various ways. Two major comparative-historical analyses of the development of education systems, and comprehensive schooling in particular, are therefore reviewed and discussed with a view to how their insights could be enriched with knowledge drawn from welfare state literature. The article argues that, while education does constitute a separate analytical issue, scholars of comprehensive and other educational reforms could nonetheless improve their arguments by taking into account the debates and theoretical elaborations produced in the field of welfare state analysis.

The elusiveness of the common school in Austria. PISA, politics and the survival of selection in a conservative regime

“…Overall, social democratic parties, and in some countries, liberal parties, were key actors pushing for comprehensive schooling in the past, while Conservative and Christian-democratic parties belonged to the main defenders of selective schooling (Österman 2017). Tracing the historical roots of national variations in comprehensive schooling in the Scandinavian countries, England and Germany, Wiborg (2009), for example, highlights how different national approaches and the success of reform ambitions were shaped by the power resources and political choices of social democratic parties, including their ability and willingness to forge coalitions with other parties (see also Sass 2015). However, the political divide between left and right has not always been that clear-cut.…”

Ascription, Achievement, and Perceived Equity of Educational Regimes: An Empirical Investigation

“…Finally, where Christian-democracy, characterized by a class-cutting constituency, was strong, the emphasis usually shifted from redistribution to insurance. Busemeyer [23] and Sass [24] apply this welfare state perspective to educational system design, arguing that left parties will be supportive of educational policies that benefit the lower tail of the educational attainment distribution, while conservative parties will oppose any drastic expansion of educational opportunities because of budgetary reasons and fears for "expectation inflation" among the working class. Indeed, Braga, Checchi, and Meschi [25] produce strong historical evidence for this correlation between political power and educational positions.…”