Journal of Education Policy Vol. 25, No. 6, November 2010, 739���747 ISSN 0268-0939 print/ISSN 1464-5106 online �� 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2010.523793 http://www.informaworld.com Governments and education reform: some lessons from the last 50 years Ben Levin* OISE, Department of Theory and Policy Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Taylor TEDP_A_523793.sgmFrancisand (Final version received 10 September 2010) 10.1080/02680939.2010.523793(online)Policy2010Educationof Journal 0268-0939 (print)/1464-5106 Original Article 2010 Taylor & Francis 25 6 000000November BenLevin Blevin@oise.utoronto.ca Over the last few decades many efforts have been made to address education issues through policy at various levels. Looking at these efforts around the world suggests that they have often been motivated more by beliefs than by evidence of impact. Not only are the wrong policies often adopted, but effective implementation of education policy is often lacking. In part this is because governments face particular constraints on what they can do. Education reform efforts would be stronger if they gave more attention to reliable research evidence and a greater focus to what is known about effective teaching. Keywords: politics education policy government reform Ever since public schools began, governments have been looking for ways to improve them. Over the last few decades many efforts have been made to address education issues through policy at various levels. Looking at these efforts around the world, one can only conclude that they have often been motivated more by untested assumptions or beliefs, or by issues currently in the public mind, than by evidence of value or potential impact (Perry et al. 2010 news.bbc.co.uk/2/mobile/education/10207406. stm?SThisEM). The current moment, as suggested by Gamble, offers some new possibilities for considering the role of the state, since much of what previously was taken-for-granted seems to have led in the wrong direction. The same is true in education where much education policy has been unsuccessful in improving student outcomes or in reducing the inequities in those outcomes while also having negative effects on educators��� morale. Any historical moment offers both opportunities and constraints. A more open ideological climate might draw attention to the fact that improvement is possible if a system focuses consistently on positive efforts to help the people involved in educa- tion to get better at what they do (Fullan and Hargreaves 2008 Levin 2008). A more open political climate might help balance some of the political exigencies that have pushed governments in other directions. Where there is a genuine political debate, the knowledge generated by research in education has more possibility for improving education policy and practice. These are the themes of this paper. *Email: ben.levin@utoronto.ca

740 B. Levin The challenge of improvement Public education has been in many ways a great human achievement, but no matter how well we do, much more is possible. The goals of education are so lofty that we must inevitably fall short in achieving them. There are still large inequalities in outcomes in every country, too often related to students��� family backgrounds or irrelevant characteristics such as skin color. Moreover, the growth in international comparisons had made it harder for most countries to be satisfied with current perfor- mance no matter how good it is. The more successful a system is, the higher will be the expectations for yet more accomplishment. One way of thinking about the challenge is to see the task of schooling as being to bring more students than ever before to higher levels of achievement than ever before on a broader range of skills and knowledge than ever before. Yet getting further improvement in results across large education systems in a reasonably short period of time turns out to be very hard to do. Many states, provinces, or countries have launched ambitious improvement plans only to find a few years later that things have remained much the same and the promised benefits have not been achieved (Levin and Fullan 2008 OECD 2009). The reasons it is so difficult to improve results are laid out in more detail in Levin (2008), but two are especially important. First, education results reflect larger problems and inequalities in societies schools cannot overcome all the inequities and problems around them. Second, many improvement projects are poorly implemented. We are only slowly learning about the challenge of improving education practice across very large numbers of schools and classrooms. In most cases there are few effective levers for doing so and often little interest by governments in that work. The wrong policies Governments are driven to tinker with the levers they control most directly whether or not those are the real drivers of outcomes. The main means used to try to generate improvement have most often been be around structural aspects of the system ��� gover- nance, finance, workforce, and accountability or incentive systems. Most of these can be changed relatively easily, at least on paper, through policy edicts, and the changes have been deeply influenced by dominant ideas rooted in economic systems such as managerialism, choice, markets, and incentives. Thus the emphasis on decentraliza- tion, competition, leadership, inspection, and accountability. There is considerable research evidence now on many of these efforts and, to sum up many studies in a few words, it is hard to find much evidence of sustained improve- ment in outcomes resulting from these efforts. Structural changes have almost always had disappointing results. Take choice and competition as drivers of improvement, an approach much favored by those who believe in markets. Various efforts in many places ��� the USA, England, New Zealand, more recently Sweden ��� show that by and large competitive pressures do not generate improvement across an entire system, though they may do so in some schools (e.g., Glatter, Woods, and Bagley 1997 Whitty, Power, and Halpin 1998). Moreover, competitive systems do seem to run the risk, at least, of increasing inequality both among and within schools (Gorard and Fitz 1998 Dyson et al. 2010). In the USA, despite all the efforts, equity results seem worse (Darling-Hammond 2010).