Payoff, capital and teachers : education policies of the 90s

Although education remains in the flux of change, reviewing the trends in educational reforms in the last decade provides opportunity to learn from the past with a view to improving the educational strategies guiding reforms in the future. As globalisation has become more consolidated in education policy, investigating how particular ideas about globalisation inhabited policy and established over time, presents ways of addressing and challenging the assumptions about education and globalization in the 90s and the fall out from these ideas. Using evidence based policy research, this paper explores how educational policies from OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank coalesced with certain notions of globalisation that strategically guided educational reforms. An analysis of education-globalisation nexus in the policies of OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank evidences the distinct character and agenda of each agency. By focusing on textual evidence, in a range of education policy from the 90s, the paper discusses how policy consolidated particular ideas about globalization and presented ‘simple’ recipes for educational change. When reviewing the 90s, the relationship between education and global change shows that OECD policy emphasized education as a social and individual payoff, World Bank policy focused on education creating certainty enabling the free flow of capital, and UNESCO policy problematised globalization and focused on the importance of teachers as a way to create stability in education during the paradoxical times. <br />