Brehm, W; Bray, M; (2016) Education governance in East Asia. UNESCO: Paris, France.

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Abstract

Many of the issues of governance faced by educational authorities in East Asia resemble those in other world regions. They include the balance of centralization or decentralization in administrative hierarchies, and the nature of school-based management. These themes are outlined in the first part of this paper. The main body of the paper then turns to a dimension that has particular prominence in East Asia. It concerns the nature of marketization and the governance and control of the supplementary tutoring industry. Marketization in educational governance models is typically conceptualized as a top-down process of logics and discourses favored by national governments as instruments to shape local practices. This paper reverses the conceptualization, viewing at least some types of marketization as bottom-up processes. Bottom-up processes can be considered practices of situated marketization  i.e. practices that occur in specific spaces and at certain times, and formed through local histories. The supplementary education industry exemplifies types of situated marketization. The paper looks at instances of situated marketization in the supplementary education industry in 10 jurisdictions of East Asia. Following the initial section on governance within the administrative hierarchy, the paper turns to an overview of marketization in the global context. This permits the commentary on East Asia to be mapped in conjunction with other parts of the world. The paper then focuses on patterns of the supplementary education industry insofar as they have implications for the authority and scope of educational governance. The paper also notes patterns of convergence and divergence between situated marketization and the logic and discourse of marketization. Finally, the paper discusses implications of the findings for policy.

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