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ICPP 2013

Panel 9. Changing concept of ’state’ and ’stateness’ in the current paradigm of Global Governance: continuing debate"

Chair Pr. Nina Belyaeva Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Session 2

Thursday 27th June, 15h45-17h45, Amphi E IEP, Grenoble

Thinking European States’ Current Transformations in Education: A

Policy Configuration Approach

Xavier Pons ponsx@wanadoo.fr

University of East-Paris Créteil (UPEC), France

Hélène Buisson-Fenet helene.buissonfenet@ens-lyon.fr

ENS Lyon, France

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Introduction

In education1, like in other fields, policy process has been through many deep changes since the 1970s (decentralization / centralization, merchandising, opening to contracts, development of evaluation strategies and of quality assurance methods, etc.). These changes paved the way for two main kinds of visions of states' current transformations in this sector. The first one tends to conclude that the state has been declining in Europe, as a result of globalization, regionalization and of the local revival. We could add to these processes those of Europeanization, commodification and privatization. This vision of the inaction and the withdrawal of a state deprived of real power were especially popularized by some writings of journalist Susan Strange on economic globalization (1996). If this vision remains a persistent myth for some (Weiss, 1998), it was very present and even dominant in contemporary works on governance and education policy, at least as a starting point for the analysis, or as an obvious element of general context2. The second one, inspired by a particular piece of historical sociology of the state (Badie & Birnbaum, 1979), by various works on the use of the political model of the state in developing countries (e.g. Badie, 1992, Bayart, 2006) but also by the theoretical famous watchword "bringing the State back in" (Evans Rueschemeyer & Skocpol, 1985) insists instead on the strengths of the nation-state framework. In the education field, the presentation of this vision is rarely so unequivocal. It appears in some contributions by Andy Green (1997) who highlights the lack of empirical basis of some theses on the globalization of education systems and their entrance into the post-modernist era and who on the contrary describes how the roles played in education by the state have evolved in various cultural and historical contexts. It is often a starting point of philosophical studies which propose to dare thinking the separation of the school and the state (Tooley, 1995) or economics ones which criticise the idea that the state would be the best provider of an education service (West, 1994). As important as the works at their origin are, these two visions are not always satisfactory when thinking states' current transformations in education. The first one may underestimate the sustainability and continuity of the state phenomenon (Du Gay & Scott, 2011). The contribution of the second one is mainly indirect and it seems more visible in the criticisms that it levels than on specific theoretical proposals. Both do not

1 Specifically primary and secondary school education. 2 See for instance many works by Roger Dale and Susan Robertson (e. g. Dale & Robertson, 2008,

Robertson, 2011). See also some publications based on the TranState project which will be rapidly mentioned above (Martens, Rusconi & Leuze, 2007, Martens et al., 2010). The evolution of the Routledge World Yearbook of Education illustrates this shift from State centred analyses to a growing scientific concern on globalisation and its effects (one issue on the relationships between the State and the Church in 1966, several others on one aspect of the globalisation process in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2012). On Europeanisation in education and the development of soft governance processes and policy tools of measurement, see, among others, the studies conducted by Martin Lawn and Jenny Ozga (e.g. Lawn, 2006, Ozga et al., 2011). Privatization of education systems and governance also led to many works, especially in England (e.g. Ball, 2007).

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always allow to address key current problems like the blurring of the boundaries between state and non-state spheres, the expansion or even dilution principles, both vertical and horizontal of state action and on the existence of different interrelated public action networks that simultaneously go through the state and compose it (Cassese & Wright, 1996). Beyond the decline/permanence alternative, the aim of this article is to contribute to a comparative sociology of state “recomposition” in the education sector, (Cassese & Wright, 1996, King & Le Galès, 2011). The problem is that this recomposition is often contingent, unstable and multidirectional and that it depends on policy configurations in which these states are led to act or react. That is why its study requires specific theoretical frameworks and research designs to be captured. The structure of this article tries to meet these requirements. First, we question the ambivalent attention paid to education in the international literature on the state. Then, we detail our theoretical approach, based on three notions (“educating states”, “figures” and “policy configurations”), and discuss to what extend it interestingly meets some theoretical challenges of the analysis of current states’ transformations. Lastly, we synthesize the findings of a specific qualitative two-year exploratory research (Evalexe Project) which compares school evaluation policies – a typical example of a “good practice” derived from the New Public Management and disseminated in several European or International arenas – in England, France, Scotland and Switzerland1 and we show that the same policy tool may lead to highly contrasted domestic policy configurations in which the figures of the educating States vary. Education and Stateness The place given to education in the international literature on the state is ambivalent in many respects. It is often taken for granted that transmission of knowledge and values between generations is one of the essential components of stateness. Education and State Building Many classic works have indeed mentioned the central role played by the development of education in the historical construction of modern states. This role was more or less important depending on the context, and the development of the education as a system was more or less fast. These phenomena primarily concerned countries where the constitution of state was the most intense because of the existence of founding revolutions as was the case in France or the United States or because of foreign military pressure as in Japan or in Prussia. But they have also affected many countries, whether in Europe (from late eighteenth century to early twentieth century), in the newly formed Western nation-states in the nineteenth century and in Japan during the Meiji era, then in the new emerging states, in Asia and elsewhere, throughout the twentieth century

1 This research is based on 101 interviews, an analysis of national and European professional and

institutional documents and a survey of national and European scientific literature. For more details, in French, see Buisson-Fenet & Pons (2011). An English book should be published in 2013.

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(Green, 1990, 2008). For Gellner (1983), the monopoly building of legitimate education is the very foundation of the creation of the European nation-states. Going from European literate agrarian societies to industrial companies requires the development of an "exo-socialization"1 which gradually becomes both a standard and an essential foundation of state power and is an important breeding ground for nationalism. By working toward the unification of an official language in many countries and by conveying constitutive epics and major ancestral figures, through history manuals, education even actively contributes to the creation of this "IKEA system" of the European nation that was described by the historian Anne-Marie Thiesse (2001), that is to say, that common set of elements and basic categories that will be built and assembled by political elites wanting to create a nation (every nation in becoming having to have a flag, an anthem, traditions, popular folklore, legendary heroes, a unified language, restored monuments, iconic landscapes, an epic history, great ancestors, etc. ). In France, many books emphasize the importance of education in the construction of citizenship (Deloye, 1994). School as a Key Tool of State Domination From the 1960s, most of the research in education has focused on presenting the state as a system of social domination and school as a central institution that reproduces and legitimises the established social order. These studies usually adopt a (neo-)Marxist perspective. It is the case for example of the first works of sociologists Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet (1971, 1979) who described French school in the 1960s as an "ideological state apparatus" (Althusser, 1970) serving the interests of the dominant upper class. In the United States, the book by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1977) shows that the American school, not only transmits knowledge and skills, but also shapes the pupils’ personalities according to their expected social role: the future workers are mainly taught submission to the rule, when for future leaders creativity and initiative are valued. Roger Dale’s works on the UK (1989) meanwhile show that public education serves in particular to reproduce an unequal class structure that is external to it2. However, this perspective is not unique, even among some sociologists inspired by Marxism or claiming to belong to this trend of analysis. In many ways, the works of Pierre Bourdieu on school as an instance of social reproduction for example (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964, 1970, Bourdieu, 1989) also adopt a neo-Weberian approach by pointing out that the relations of domination are not limited to the economic sphere but that they also materialize in many forms of symbolic violence, the state having, according to him, the monopoly of that violence (Bourdieu 1984: 42). Education: A Possible Illustration of Current State Transformations (Only?) One might therefore expect for education to be seen as a prime analytical input to study the current recompositions in the state. But this is far from being always the case. The

1 “The production and reproduction of men outside the local intimate unit” (Gellner, 1983: 38). 2 Most of the contributions in the books edited by this author in 1981 on the state and education adopt

the same kind of approach and address the forms of social domination, class inequalities and dominant ideologies at the origin of education systems and reproduced by it (Dale, 1981a, 1981b).

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main works that have adopted a strong position in the debate on the definition and permanence of the state does not evoke the education sector (Badie & Birnbaum, 1979 Evans Rueschemeyer & Skocpol 1985, Cassese & Wright, 1996 Strange, 1996) and it is often other sectors or themes that are preferred when proposing a new perspective on the cultural and historical variations in the formation of states (taxation, gender, war etc..). Moreover, in the current "empirical research projects” on the recompositions of the state identified by Patrick Le Gales and Desmond King (2011: 460-464) in their introduction to a recent issue of the French Review of Sociology entitled "Conceptualizing the contemporary state", education is at best considered an example of an area where cross-cutting reforms are carried out, and not as a privileged and informative field of investigation of possible recompositions in progress. Two examples are listed by these authors. The mapping project of the Irish government led by Niamh Hardiman and Colin Scott ("Mapping the Irish State"), as it is to be seen online in a series of “discussion papers"1 sometimes refers to education, especially when it comes to discussing an "agencification" process, meaning the development and the growing influence of agencies in the regulation of Irish public services (MacCárthaigh, 2010, Brown & Scott, 2010). But they are mainly mentioned to an illustrative end. Unlike other policies (reforms of administrations, economic policies, health policies) and other areas (urban governance, cultural and religious identities) specifically studied in this project, the transformations of state educational policies seem to take little space in the overall reflection on state recompositions, even though Ireland could be an interesting case for the analysis of state subsidization of private schools, which represents very well the "new education policies" implemented in many OECD countries (Mons, 2007), and of a significant change in governance from 1997 which can be seen especially in a significant restructuring of inspection (Coolaham & O'Donavan, 2009). The contribution of the large scale project of the University of Bremen directed by Stephan Leibfried on the transformations of the state ("transtate project", 2003-2014) is also ambivalent. On the one hand, this project, which is now a major contribution to the comparative analysis of the recompositions of state, explicitly integrates education as one of his fields of study. The consultation in November 2012 of the list of publications and "working papers" coming from this research shows that it aims at studying the evolution of the patterns of governance of various educational systems in the world (Germany, China, United States, France, New Zealand). These works on education, though they aren’t a central field of study, feed and illustrate a great number of reflections on the transformations of the state identified by the project: the replacement of differentiated, autonomous and public state organizations by regulatory agencies and organizations, both public and private that undermine the traditional boundaries of the state sphere (Hardiman & Scott, 2009), the essential influence of international organizations on the States’ policies (Dobbins & Martens, 2012) or the thesis of the denationalization of political authority and the idea that the state would no longer exercise a monopoly of political authority but that it would continue to play a central role in its administration (Genschel & Zangl, 2011).

1 See http://www.ucd.ie/

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But on the other hand, several conclusions of the TransState project are far from relying all on obvious empirical basis concerning education. For example, the idea of an extension of international decision-making skills to the foundation of the theory of internationalization of political authority (which, it should be reminded, would contribute with privatization and transnationalization, to the denationalization of that authority) is far from obvious in the case of education as the authors themselves acknowledge (Genschel & Zangl, 2011: 526). The very idea that privatization, internationalization and transnationalization and, could we add, the commodification logically result in a denationalization of political authority is not so obvious. The example of England is very instructive, since the use of market, the penetration of private interests and the application of several international doctrines was also accompanied by a " bureaucratic revolution " in the sense of Max Weber (Le Gales & Scott, 2008), in the education sector as in others hence by a centralization and a growing state control of education, whether it is studied through a specific government program like the "academies" (Gunter, 2011) or by combining the history and analysis of policies to account for the reforms undertaken over the past three decades (Furlong & Phillips, 2001). Finally, most of the "working papers" devoted to educational policies mention the importance of the international survey PISA1 and the influence of the"soft" governance by international and supranational organizations on the educational policies of states (Martens, Rusconi & Leuze , 2007, Martens et al., 2010), when they do not rely almost exclusively on these aspects to think change in educational policies (Nieman, 2009). But this approach raises several problems. It tends to minimize the effects of the reception of the international surveys on the policy process in the public debate, and the immediate translation of their results according to multiple indigenous imperatives (Pons, 2012b). In addition, the theses and recommendations issued under this soft governance are strongly altered throughout their distribution ("policy diffusion") by a series of factors such as, in France for example, the role of identities and of professional mediations. These factors are all opportunities for states to redefine the conduct of their educational policies, through their elites, their organizations, their policies and their government sciences. Theoretical Stakes and Approach

The ambivalence of these current researches on the recomposition of the state are major contributions to the understanding of important macro and transversal trends but at the same time, their relevance and empirical scope are limited in the specific sector of education. That ambivalence leads us to use a theoretical framework that has both a certain conceptual plasticity and sufficient precision to enable extrapolation concerning the transformations of the state form. This framework should help provide answers to some challenges and debates which are present in the international literature about state.

1 Programme for International Student Assessment.

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Addressing Two Main Theoretical Questions D. King and P. Le Gales (2011) have identified two particularly fierce ones. The first concerns the definition of state and opposes in a simplified manner the approaches seeking to stabilize clearly that definition and those that reject any generic claim. Among the first types of approach, the analytical perspective introduced by Max Weber which defines the state as "a political institution with a continuous activity, the head “la direction” of which successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate physical violence for the implementation of established regulations ", has also been repeatedly cited and amended (Weber, 1971: 57). It has been used, for example, to analyze other processes of monopolization, such as those of tax or of territory (Elias, 2003) or symbolic dimensions of violence, of power and political dominations (Bourdieu , 2012) or to add to this principle of monopolization other principles that are constitutive of state formation, such as a double differentiation of the state towards civil society on the one hand and of the State elites within it on the other hand (Badie & Birnbaum, 1994). Many works, however, reject these attempted definitions. Constructivist analyzes criticize their essentialist character and emphasize the different forms and meanings taken by the State according to the social and political contexts, sometimes even to the point of challenging any generic use of the term State (Skinner, 2009). Other studies adopt a culturalist perspective which is more or less strong and explicit to challenge the growing importance concerning the state theory taken by a European vision of the state, to criticize the relevance, the historical and cultural specificity of the distinction between strong states and weak states or to develop an analysis of the State building coming from one of its dimensions little studied till then, and which is considered decisive and which takes on variable empirical forms depending on the context: for example the question of gender (Adams, 2005), of war and economic competition (Spruyt, 2002), of public statistics (Desrosières, 1993) or of knowledge and technologies (Carroll, 2006). Stimulating as they might be for our research, especially because they are a constant reminder that the effects of context need to be taken into account for any comparison, these approaches are not themselves immune from criticism which is a challenge to a sociology of the recompositions of State in education. In wanting too much to deconstruct or contextualize the analysis of the state, the risk is great indeed to highly dilute the notion of state into a plurality of social and political processes, and thus to diminish the value of its study. Finally, it is difficult to detect in these analytical frameworks the bases of the specificity of the state compared to other forms of institutionalization of political power and to detect how its study is essential or even relevant. Are there as many states as there are “ideas in context” if we make use of the method of analysis adopted by Quentin Skinner (2009)? In addition, the definitional approach has the great merit of inviting us to clearly distinguish between the recompositions of the state and the transformations of the modes of government or the changes in political regimes (Du Gay & Scott, 2011), and of avoiding harmful conceptual confusion.

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The second debate identified by D. King and P. Le Gales (2011), is related to the previous one, without completely coinciding with it, and it opposes two perspectives on state: one insists on the "being" and the other on the "doing". For the French political scientist Jean Leca (2010), beyond the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan, the approaches that question the being of the State have developed three main analytic conceptions: the state as power (Machiavelli’s or Schmitt’s views) the state as law “droit” (Kelsen’s Rechstaat) and the state as legitimacy (Hegel and Weber). In addition to these conceptualizations, several studies have also highlighted three major historical experiences of the State: the State as a reflection of a hierarchical social order, as a reflection of an individualistic social order accessible to reason or as safeguarding the community against the dissolution of the market society. These approaches question the immanence of the state, but others prefer to examine the variations of the state concretely (Padioleau, 1982) or in action (Jobert& Muller, 1987), to examine the multiple incarnations of the State in government action, in other words what the state "does". The recomposition of the state must then be analyzed through the transformations of public action, and the state must thus be defined through "its activities, its policies and its instruments", that which D. King and P. Le Galès call the policy state (King & Le Gales, 2011: 467). These two approaches are far from being incompatible. As emphasized by J. Leca (2010), M. Weber’s definition as stated above for example, questions "being" (through the issue of legitimacy) as well as "doing" that is perceptible in terms such as continuous activity, demand or more directly the exercise this legitimate physical violence. However, the debate still seems very much alive among the specialists of policy analysis and some representatives of the comparative sociology of the state. The latter especially reproach the former with overestimating the magnitude of the changes at work and with underestimating the importance of the type of state as an explanatory variable (Birnbaum, 2011). They plead for greater consideration of long-term phenomena and for various conceptual clarifications (Du Gay & Scott, 2011). The question being asked is then that of the permanence in time of the state form beyond the changes that affect political action and the art of governing and, as a corollary, that of the consideration of this permanence in the analysis of the types of recomposition of the state at work. Once again, each approach generates its own limits, and going beyond these limits is really challenging for any sociology of the recomposition of state. On the one hand, as argued by the supporters of the policy state, it seems impossible to ignore this "increasing entropy" of the state whose activities, undergoing transformation, multiply in areas increasingly diverse (Le Gales & King, 2011: 469) and it is more and more difficult, in this context, to support the idea that the genesis of the forms of state would be the main explaining variable for their current transformations. On the other hand, it seems all the more necessary, for these very reasons, to try and get a clear and operative vision of the state to distinguish between what is linked to the state and what is not, in policy processes that are getting increasingly complex.

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Towards a Sociology of the Figures of Educating States This article does not claim to deal with all the aspects of state action in education but only to analyze one of its main forms: that of the educating state. The concept of educating State has so far been little theorized by researchers, though it has been highly politicized and often used in public debate both by the Liberals in the early twentieth century who condemned the encroachment of state power on an area considered as being reserved to the families, and by those who, on the contrary, wish for a deeper involvement of the state concerning education. It is true that all states are not or might not have been "educating" and that this idea has different meanings according to various national histories. In France for example, it is strongly inspired by the experience of the Third Republic (Ministry of Jules Ferry). The centralized and national educating State, promoted the universality of Reason and the unity of the Republic. On behalf of public interest or common welfare, the decisions "are exclusively made at the top to be enforced at the base." Such a state assimilated differences through education (social, territorial or even ethnic) rather than institutionalized "a place for sharing and exchanging" them (Dutercq 2005, 180 and 182). In the German-speaking area, the concept of Erziehungsstaat means a State which claims control at all stages of life, encompassing both education and socialization. The state tries to influence the mind and will of citizens with measures of indoctrination or of repression (hence the association between Erziehungsstaat and Bewusstseinsbeherrschung, that is to say the control of consciousness). This ambition is often associated with a form of utopia: training “former” the new man and moving toward the perfect state. Therefore there is an authoritarian or even a totalitarian dimension to the notion of Erziehungsstaathas. It has a different ideology from that of educating state in French and is more narrow. Historically, three characteristics common to various educating States may be highlighted (Barroche, Le Bouëdec & Pons, 2008).These refer to States that started to build a nationwide education system in the eighteenth century (Green, 1990). The nineteenth century thus is the century of the construction of a "monopoly of legitimate education" by these states (Gellner 1989: 56). To establish the sovereignty of the State, promote national cohesion, but also train an efficient workforce, it is necessary to provide a universal and egalitarian education, which is not submitted to the original communities (family, cultural or religious communities). In order to do this, they intend to act directly on the politically legitimate educational curriculum, for example by introducing civic education lessons or by giving great value to the great national stories in the history curriculum (Thiesse, 1999). Finally, they develop bureaucracies in charge of administering, managing and controlling education. A comparison between the modes of regulation of the local educational spaces in five European countries (England, Belgium, France, Hungary and Portugal) reached the conclusion that despite very strong national characteristics, an educating state existed in most countries, to greater or lesser degrees, which gave birth to an intense production of norms that are increasingly standardized, identical and implemented by a bureaucracy that gets more and more complex, according to the topics that need to be dealt with. What is then at stake politically is to control that the action of bureaucracy complies with these norms (for example through the creation of inspection bodies). These standards are negotiated

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directly between the state (or its representatives) and the concerned professional organizations, particularly those representing teachers (Maroy, 2006), and usually at the national level. In this article, educating states are defined as modes of regulation in which state organizations (departments and ministries, administrations and bodies of State, government agencies, commissioned organizations etc) wish to control as much as possible the organization, the content and purposes of education, this being done through different ways (production of norms, curricula, providing of managing tools and of policy instruments etc). This definition focuses deliberately on the education sector even if the notion of educating states are sometimes used in other fields (especially for totalitarian institutions) but it allows addressing general questions on state power and domination. If as a synthetic definition, it tries to answer to the question of the “being” of the educating state, it is based on a movement (always more controlling actors), a diversity of objects (the organization, the content and purposes of education) and the action of various state bodies which all of them allow us to study the “doing” of the state. Lastly, the scope of this definition clearly depends on the meaning of “state organisations”. In order to avoid a too restrictive definition for our comparison, we mobilised the definition proposed by two sociologists of the state, that of a centralised, differentiated, institutionalised, autonomous and sovereign political system (Badie & Birnbaum, 1994). Thus state organisations are those who depend on this centralised, differentiated, institutionalised, autonomous and sovereign power like the English and French states, the Scottish Office Education and Industry Department, the Swiss “cantons” and possibly, the Swiss federal Republic as a whole according to the outcome of the on-going harmonisation process in primary and secondary education. Such a definition does not imply an essentialist approach. It rather invites us to study the various forms and activities of educating states according to the contexts. To do so, it seemed to us particularly useful to mobilise the notion of “figure”. A figure is not regarded here as a series of functional relations between the state, education and politics, nor as a weberian ideal-type. It is understood as the expression of a case (“cas de figure” in French), as a specific crystallisation which extrapolation and generalisation are sometimes difficult, as an intensive summary of complex interactions in a specific frame which is often “embodied” and full of typical “pictures” (Barroche, Le Bouëdec & Pons, 2008). Different theoretical perspectives of that notion of figures can be adopted1. Ours consists in defining the figure of an educating state as the particular form that it takes in a whole policy configuration. Configuration refers here to the notion developed by Norbert Elias (1991) and a policy configuration can be defined as a particular set of factors within the policy process which shapes specific interdependencies between policy actors.

1 See for instance that of Pierre Rosanvallon (1990) in his history of the French State.

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Policy Configuration: a Flexible but Demanding Notion The notion of policy configuration seems to us very interesting in many respects. First it allows to analyse the links between the social relations which give birth to a particular policy and this policy itself. It invites to take into account the social games between actors in specific contexts as requires a comparison of the figures taken by the educating states. It is thus an interesting way to go beyond some works about globalisation, internationalisation and Europeanization in education which contemplate the role of the state mainly through the question of the main level of policy implementation. Instead of asking if there is a “new global educational order” (Weber & Laval, 2003) or a “new local educational order” in the French governance in education (Ben Ayed, 2009), if globalisation puts an end to the territory based approach of education policies (Carney, 2012), if globalisation is just a series of national particularisms extended at the global level or if intermediary regulations prevails over local, national and supranational ones (Dutercq, 2005), the policy configuration approach proposes another analytical delimitation of policy spaces in which the struggles between actors take place and in which the frontiers depend on the set of interdependencies that policy actors shape. The notion is no less rich and demanding. It is rich because it integrates a theory of power – regarded as the capacity to make someone act in a specific set of interdependencies and not as a capital that is owned – which is adapted to the analysis of policy conception, implementation and reception. As Bourdieu shows in his comments on Elias’s contribution on state theory (Bourdieu, 2012: 209), the configuration approach also integrates a theory of the becoming of the state in a context of power extension, that of the sociology of the state within more complex and growing chains of interdependencies between political actors. This notion is also demanding because it requires an important research on the various sources and foundations of these interdependencies which is both theoretical and empirical. In policy analysis, it is mainly the institutional variable that has been put forward to explain these interdependences, namely, their foundations, forms and evolutions, especially in neo-institutionalist theories (North, 1990), with policy analysts stressing different sources of the structuring power of institutions (Hall & Taylor, 1997). For some French policy analysts (Bezes & Pierru, 2012), the American works on neo-institutionalism, especially the historical one, even allowed to reconcile some perspectives of analysis (policy analysis, sociologies of the State and bureaucracies) which were developed autonomously and separately before through and within various theoretical streams (policy analysis, public administration, theory of the State). Our approach in this article and in the research study that is presented below insists on three main dimensions of policy configurations, three main foundations of the interdependencies between policy actors. The first one is institutional and refers to the institutional forms taken by school external evaluation processes. By defining the formal rules of the games, institutional designs strongly predetermine the role and routines of policy actors, their margins and spaces of liberty, their degree and form of coordination. More precisely, three kinds of process contribute to the definition of an

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institutional order and to its structuring power on interdependencies. Institutional designs lead generally to a deep interiorisation by policy actors of institutional constraints so that each institution is linked with a specific culture and a specific history which tend to be taken for granted. Institutional designs are based on several codified processes which bring about, among other things, to the creation of veto points and veto players which play an active role either in the reproduction of the institutional order, or in a modification which can reinforce their own power. Institutions also provide policy actors with material and symbolic resources and favour the constitution of various coalitions of beneficiaries and constituencies which implement different strategies to legitimate institutions (Bezes & Le Lidec, 2012). The second dimension is professional. One can indeed reasonably assume that in European educational systems which were historically built on the accumulation of different professional bodies and in which a corporatist and bureaucratic regulation has prevailed for a long time (Maroy, 2006), the way in which policy actors define their job (professional identity), embody it in specific activities (professional skills and competencies) and struggle for it (professional legitimation) plays an important role in their involvement in the policy process and in their actual evaluation practices (Hassenteufel, 1997, Deroche & Jeannot, 2004, Buisson-Fenet & Le Naour, 2008, Le Bianic & Vion, 2008, Pons, 2010). The third one is cognitive and designates all the representations, ideas, and pieces of knowledge that policy actors from the same educational system may share and which may influence their conception of evaluation. By providing policy actors with, among others, common policy narratives and collective interpretative frameworks of current policy phenomena, these cognitive elements strongly contribute to provide order in complex societies (Muller, 2000). The Evalexe Research To analyse the current recompositions of the state in education in Europe and the various figures taken by European educating states, we compared the policy configurations that become knotted when external evaluations of schools are conducted, in England, in Scotland, in France and in Switzerland. Object Here the “schools” designate general state establishments, or private ones with state contract, mainly in primary education and lower secondary education (Unesco's ISCED 2011, levels 1 and 2)1. School evaluation is broadly defined as a reflexive and collective process of the production of feedback on the functioning of schools which allows policy actors to appreciate, in reference to various political values (efficiency, equity, quality, relevance etc.), both their organisation, their results and the effects of the various measures implemented to reform and regulate them or the education they provide to their pupils. External evaluation can be understood as an evaluation conducted by people coming from outside or as an evaluation not commissioned by the school itself.

1 However, the possibilities offered by the field research have sometimes led us to incorporate in our

field of analysis establishments that do not strictly belong to compulsory education, mainly lycées in France and Sixth form colleges in England.

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Studying the school external evaluation process seems particularly relevant when questioning the current evolutions of these educating States. Globally, political scientists who deeply analysed the forms and evolution of New Public Management clearly stressed that evaluation was a key principle of this doctrine since, by quantifying performance and measuring the outcomes of public organisations, it is supposed to invite the latter to increase accountability and to shift to an obligation towards results (Hood, 1991, 1996; Christensen & Lægreid, 2001). In the educational sector in particular, the external evaluation of schools was described as one of the six new education policies implemented in European countries that had contributed to progressively define new models of post-bureaucratic regulation of educational systems (Maroy, 2006) and as one of the major devices at the origin of new accountability policies (Harris & Herrington, 2006). Evaluation as a business was also described as a professional space contributing to the diffusion of a new soft governance of education at the European level (Lawn, 2006; Normand, 2010). Closer to our reflections on educating States, another conception of evaluation sees it as a contemporary and renewed form taken on by the control of teaching in this context of transformation of the modes of regulating and governing (Revue internationale d'éducation, 2008). Complementarily, this research on the external evaluation of schools is also a way of questioning the empiric relevance of an “evaluative State” studied particularly by education researchers (Neave, 1988, Brodafoot, 2000, Maroy, 2006, Van Haecht, 2007, Dumay, 2009). Methodology

The Evalexe research was funded by the “Centre Henri Aigueperse”, an institute of research depending on a major French federation of unions in education (Unsa-éducation) with the support of the IRES1. If our funders, who we had never met before, were interested by the theme of evaluation in general, we were entirely free to choose the topic of the research and to design it. We took this situation as an opportunity to go and do research abroad to try to understand “from inside” the changes of the governance of educational systems through the implementation of a specific regulation tool: school external evaluation. In our mind, it was an interesting way to confront our findings with typical presentations of foreign educational systems that were sometimes proposed in France. Yet, because of other professional obligations mainly, we could not stay a long period of time in each foreign country and had to move several times, generally for one intensive week of field research. Our data and materials were collected in each country through three main qualitative methods of research: semi-conducted interviews (101 in total for an average time of one hour and a half, 91 are used in this paper), analysis of national and European professional and institutional documents and survey of national and European scientific literature2. When it was possible, we also conducted observations (mainly inspectors'

1 Institute of Economical and Social Research. 2 Surveys were made within organisations which were reputed to have an important documentation in

education and a good visibility of the national production of research. For more details, see the

14

meetings, at the international and regional levels) and exploited personal archives of evaluators (like for example those of a French member of the SICI1). For the study of the French case, we also added punctually some materials gathered in a former research on the role of evaluators in the national policy of evaluation in education, like the internal news bulletins of the high central inspectorates (Pons, 2010). We concentrated our researches on specific territories which could be regarded as relatively comparable to the two French “académies” (Créteil, Aix-Marseille) in which we could guarantee the possibility to lead effectively the research: two local educational authorities (LEAs) in the London area (Greenwich and Southwark), the LEA of Edinburgh and two Swiss French speaking “cantons” (Geneva, Valais) . The idea was not to provide detailed monographs of territories but rather to understand within and through them the evolution of the regulation of the educational system in general regarding school evaluation. Given the short period of time, we decided to focus on specific countries. Given the purposes of this paper, we will focus on England, France and Switzerland. England was selected as an example of a country in which school evaluation is regular and highly institutionalised. In Switzerland on the contrary, school external evaluation procedures are relatively recent and unequally developed from a canton to another. France constitutes an interesting intermediary case of a country in which school evaluation was rapidly institutionalised but in which, beyond the numerous discourses on the need to evaluate more, actual and regular practices of evaluation remain uncertain. Main Findings

The Weight of Domestic Contexts Our research stresses first the importance of the institutional and the political domestic contexts to understand the specificities of the move in each country to a policy of school external evaluation. Far away from the assumption that often share the instigators of new policies of accountability in education at the national and international levels, who tend to think that new regulation tools like school evaluation can “travel” easily across different contexts since they imply mainly procedural and not substantial changes of the policy process (Ball, 2006; 0zga & Jones, 2006), the research shows 1) that there are various degrees and forms taken by the institutionalisation of the external evaluation of schools from a country to another and 2) that the move to these forms of evaluation was mainly due to domestic political factors. In England, the implementation of a systematic and standardised process of inspection by a non-ministerial central government agency (Ofsted2) was a means to struggle against local and professional powers and to improve standards by creating a market

Evalexe research report (Buisson-Fenet & Pons, 2011: 203-220) available on: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00605994/en/.

1 Standing International Conference of Central and General Inspectorates. 2 Office for standards in education.

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regulated by central agencies. In France, it was only from the 1980s, when for structural and cognitive reasons the school as an organisation appeared as a relevant level of implementation of education policies that official texts on evaluation were enacted and speeches about the need to improve the culture of evaluation in this country were pronounced. In Switzerland, the first initiatives of school external evaluation in the German speaking cantons took place in the 2000s in a broader context of a progressive harmonisation of compulsory education at the federal level (HarmoS project) in a country that is composed by 26 different cantonal educational systems. If the cantons are still responsible for the external evaluation of their schools and if effective practices are more or less institutionalised from a canton to another, the HarmoS project progressively pointed out the need to reinforce the role of headteachers and school leaders in various cantonal systems, paving the way for questions about the possible evaluation of these systems at the school level. Various Sources of Interdependencies The second interesting finding of the Evalexe research is that the source of interdependences between the policy actors who are involved in the external evaluation of schools is far from being the same in each educational system. To say it briefly, in England this source is mainly institutional whereas in France it is rather professional and in Switzerland more cognitive. This means that beyond a similar and progressive shift to a new set of policies and regulation tools, the foundations, the concrete forms and the political meaning of public actions can be very different. In England, the Ofsted's section 5 inspection procedure is a very formalised process which has many structuring effects on the policy configuration created around school external evaluation. This power is visible in the three sources of interdependencies studied in our research. Institutionally, it is first visible in the role of quality assurance given to the Ofsted inspection in the global English quasi-market of compulsory education and in the various uses of the “Ofsted” label by successful schools or professionals, in the effects on the procedure on the constitution of a whole market of self-evaluation and consultancy which directly depends on this particular institutional arrangement and in the particular evolutions of some institutional actors (like Local educational authorities or teachers’ unions). Professionally, the procedure makes deeply evolve the professional identities of all the policy actors which are concerned by its implementation (inspectors and head teachers in particular). But it may be even cognitively that the structuring power of the procedure is the most impressive. The latter imposed first its own language with its acronyms, its regular publications, its own history and its expressions: Ofsted is not any more only an acronym, it becomes an adjective, or even an adverb (to be an “Ofsted inspector”, to succeed to “your Ofsted” etc.). The procedure also had an influence on the evolution of the research in education which increased its focus on inspection practices and their impact and on the conceptions of evaluation put forward in interviews. In France, the policy configuration is to some extent opposed to the English one. First, the official texts regulating evaluation, the business annual programs of official

16

evaluators or the speeches on that topic from the political leaders remain extremely vague and never detail the notion, the expected practices or procedures and the explicit political aims of evaluation. The effective practices of school external evaluation are irregular, in time and in space. There remain several obstacles to the implementation of a school external evaluation policy which are both political (turn-over of political leaders, hesitations concerning the implementation of new regulation tools), institutional (distribution of powers between the state and local authorities in the governance of schools, accumulation of various missions by inspection bodies), professional (the implementation of a school evaluation policy questions several professional identities within the education system) and cognitive (low impact of the research on evaluators’ practices). In that context, the existence of a school evaluation process (or not) in specific contexts, its more or less important duration and its institutional design directly depend on the degree of convergence of the professional identities of policy actors on this specific topic of evaluation. Since the political leaders do not remove the ambiguities of their intentions, since the institutional architecture and the official texts are not clear, it is only if the professional imperative of school evaluation is shared by a significant part of the policy actors that school evaluation can be implemented. In the two French-speaking cantons that we studied (Geneva and Valais), the external evaluation of schools was often associated in interviews or in various papers (press articles, speeches, research publications etc.) with negative representations which all questioned the legitimacy of this regulation tool and it implementation. School evaluation is assimilated with ranking and is strongly criticised for that. School external evaluation is more developed in German-speaking cantons and the other cantons are not sure that this new practice can and should be “imported” in their own educational system. Researches and statistical studies little address the question of the school effect in general. When they do so, they generally call for prudence and plead for a comprehensive, multilateral and highly contextualised approach of the school and its environment. Lastly, when they describe their conception of a good school in interviews, our interlocutors insisted a lot on the climate, the well-being of pupils and teachers and the reciprocal entente between the professional of educations and parents rather than on performance and school leadership. In their mind, the evaluation of a school must help the school and not be only an instrument of control. In that particular cognitive context, interdependencies between actors in terms of school external evaluation remain embryonic and depend mainly on the regulation tools chosen to organise and regulate the harmonisation of compulsory education at the national level (and then at the regional and cantonal ones) like the HarmoS standards, the global monitoring of education in Switzerland, Pisa or the Plan for a Roman Education (“plan d'étude romand”). These interdependencies intertwine when experts and cantonal authorities have to take technical decisions which have deep political implications as when they must decide for instance if the results of pupils to HarmoS standards and regional French-speaking tests must be published. This coordination of policy actors through instruments is the logical consequence of the uncertainties around the current

17

change of governance of the Swiss educational sector at the national level and the result of the particular state of the public opinion regarding school evaluation. It is also the fruit of a specific political strategy which consists in betting on an harmonisation through technical regulation tools in a country in which former attempts to harmonise education on the basis of common values often failed (Buisson-Fenet & Pons, 2011). Various Figures of Educating States The third finding of this research is that the form taken by the state is different from a policy configuration to another. Table 1 synthesizes these policy configurations briefly presented above and the figure of the state in each of them. In England, the current figure of the educating state is essentially that of an evaluative one. As it is mentioned above, this figure has been rapidly identified in the international literature on the new forms of regulation and governance of education systems, but very often on the basis of different (and sometimes national dependent) definitions. Ours insists on its role within the policy process and defines the evaluative state as a state in which the political goals and values of policies (here education policies) are guaranteed by the continuous, codified and corrective evaluation of common and detailed targets and objectives which have been elaborated collaboratively by the state and its partners. Contrary to the idea sometimes developed in some research studies of the convergence, as partial or unequal as it may be, of the European educational systems toward modes of post-bureaucratic institutional regulation similar to the evaluating State's mode, the research study shows that there exist various forms for the educating state in other countries. In France, the figure of the educating state is that of a neocorporatist one in which the definition and the effective implementation of policies are actually entrusted to professional groups which compose it. In Switzerland lastly, a particular figure appears both within the two French-speaking cantons and at the national federal level: that of a monitoring state, i.e. a minimum state in which the control of education is both distant (distant recording of data on the system), discontinuous (alarm mode of organisation) and second compared to the social control by small communities of professionals and citizens that the state accompanies without questioning it.

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Table 1. From Policy Configurations to Figures of the State

Countries Dimensions of configurations Main driver of

interdependencies Figure of the

State Institutional Professional Cognitive

England Detailed procedure of inspection

Key role in quality

insurance and standard achievement evaluation

Involving effect on the business of school self-

evaluation and inspection

Conflicts on categories

Unions’ contestations

contributing to the centrality of the

inspection process

Redefinition of professional

identities according to the

procedure

Professional labels of quality

Specific “Ofsted” language

A process with its

own history

Researches on inspection

Pragmatic

conceptions of the “good school”

An institutional procedure

Evaluative State

France Vagueness of official texts on evaluation

Irregular school

evaluation processes in time and space

Many political and

institutional obstacles to the implementation

of evaluation

Uncertain changes of the professional

identities of evaluators

Various

professional oppositions to

evaluation

Low knowledge on research findings

Variability of the conceptions of

evaluation

Professional identities

Neocorporatist

State

Switzerland Accumulation of new policy tools (standards,

monitoring process, regional curriculum

plans, cantonal assessments)

Focus on pupils’

standardised assessments

Importance given to traditional feedbacks

(rumours, interpersonal networks, bureaucratic

data)

Various evolutions of inspectorates according to the

cantons

Evolution of school heads

Evaluation as a strong dissonance

(denunciation of rankings, warning of

researchers)

School as a human community

Evaluation as a

possible part of the harmonisation process

Policy tools Monitoring State

19

Conclusion: Thinking the Plasticity of Governing Changes and Policy Spaces of

Reference

To summarize, this research study shows that the same policy tool may lead to highly contrasted domestic policy configurations in which the figures of the educating states may vary (evaluative state, neocorporatist one, monitoring one). Beyond the debate on the possible decline of the state, beyond also visions of State changes as a “shift” to new governance paradigms, our approach pleads for a contextualised analysis of translation, hybridization and layering processes of the state’s roles and forms in a global governance context. The last two figures in particular clearly highlight that the implementation of a sometimes called post-bureaucratic policy tool (school evaluation) may lead to specific figures of educating states which can be understood only by replacing them within particular policy configurations with their own features and history. This conclusion clearly invites the researchers to make evolve their conceptual and theoretical frameworks to better think the growing plasticity of governing changes and policy spaces of reference of social and political actors. The classical notion of configuration, when it is linked to that of policy and figure, may enable it. It is not the only one of course1 but it seems to be a particularly productive one as revealed other uses that we could not develop in this article, like the combination of figures within the same education system according to the various policy contexts. References

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