In the past two decades, nearly all the countries in Southeast Asia have undertaken higher education reforms such as the massification, marketization, diversification, bureaucratization, and internationalization of higher education. All these reforms are aimed at widening access to higher education and diversifying its funding sources, as well as improving the quality, efficiency, and productivity of the higher education sector. Under such circumstances, much research has been done on how the governance and management of universities have changed over the years in these countries.
The governance of universities focuses on the role of the state in providing, regulating, supervising, and steering the development of higher education in the country. The relationship between universities and the state revolves around the issues of autonomy and accountability. An emerging regional trend in the reforms of university governance is an increase in institutional autonomy in return for more public accountability. Several countries have shifted from a state-control model to a state-supervising model and from public provision of higher education to the privatization of higher education, the corporatization of public universities, and the establishment of autonomous universities. To ensure public accountability, most universities are subjected to both internal and external quality assurance.
With the massification of higher education, universities usually enroll large numbers of students and become more complex organizations. In the context of governmental budget cuts, many universities are under great pressure to do more with less, to find ways to be less wasteful, and to develop better management in order to replace the missing resources. Various universities have adopted new public management techniques and a result-based management approach to improve efficiency and effectiveness. A central feature of new managerialism is “performativity” in the management of academic labor and the pressure for “academic capitalism.”
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University Governance and Management in Southeast Asia
Molly N.N. Lee and Chang Da Wan
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Inclusive and Special Education in Asia
Maya Kalyanpur
Any analysis of inclusive and special education in Asia, past and present, must account for the immense variation in what constitutes Asia and recognize that finding patterns in the development of inclusive and special education across this vast continent is difficult. The variations relate to geographic topography, historical experiences, and cultural values, as well as to contemporary socio-economic and political conditions. For example, although both Oman and Timor Leste struggle with issues of accessibility and providing services in remote areas, Timor Leste’s mountainous terrain presents very different challenges from Oman’s desert conditions. Similarly, the different cultural influences of, say, Hinduism in Nepal, Islam in Jordan, and Buddhism in Cambodia have significant implications for attitudes towards disability, while differences in economic development between Japan and Bangladesh, for instance, have rendered the former a donor of international aid that sets the inclusive education agenda and the latter a recipient of both aid and agenda. While efforts to identify patterns in inclusive education globally have also attempted to define the nature of development in Asia, these analyses do not always account for the unique intra-continental variations.
Overlooking these variations in socio-political and economic contexts becomes problematic when attempting to find solutions towards providing culturally responsive and culturally specific services appropriate to these unique circumstances. Additionally troubling is the more recent development of a geopolitical climate which assumes that inclusive and special education could and should, in fact, be the same, whether in Bangladesh or in Japan. Embodied by international aid agencies, such as the World Bank, the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), these expectations have been captured within global policies, such as the 1994 Salamanca Statement on Inclusive Education, the 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and more recently, the 2015 Millennium Sustainable Goals, and furthered through UNICEF’s and UNESCO’s curriculum packages and professional development training on inclusive education. There is a nascent body of scholars in some Asian countries that is beginning to identify indigenous alternatives, which, if allowed to thrive, could contribute to the development of an amalgamated structure of services that would be more appropriate to the individual contexts.
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Financing Mechanisms to Support Inclusive Practice
Serge Ebersold, Edda Óskarsdóttir, and Amanda Watkins
Financing plays a critical role in achieving more inclusive education systems, and most European countries are considering how the way they fund education impacts the policy goal of more inclusive practice in schools. The way financing is determined in laws and regulations has a direct impact on decision-making and implementation in relation to identifying learners’ educational needs, diagnostic and assessment procedures that might be used. Crucially it impacts on the placement of learners in different types of provision, including separate special classes or special schools.
Financing inclusive education systems differs from financing special needs education in several important ways. In addition to providing shared educational opportunities for learners with recognised additional needs with their peers in mainstream settings, financing inclusive education systems aims to enable all learners to gain access to the educational support they are legally entitled to. Financing inclusive education systems is also far more complex than financing general education as it relates to a multilevel and multi-stakeholder framework of policy and provision that includes non-educational aspects of educational provision that are needed to ensure all learners access to high-quality inclusive education. These non-educational aspects may cover factors such as accessibility of the physical environment, specialist support, different resources for reducing the functional consequences of different disabilities, as well as financial support for families in meeting the direct and indirect costs of education.
Effective mechanisms for financing inclusive education systems entail the provision of additional funding and resources that encourage mainstream schools to develop inclusive education policies, as well as innovative and flexible learning environments that meet a wider range of learners’ academic and social needs and requirements. A higher amount of funding does not in itself guarantee better learning conditions; the successful implementation of inclusive education policies depends on how funds are allocated and to whom the funds are addressed, rather than solely on how much money is available. Effective inclusive education systems build upon funding mechanisms and strategies that consider and manage the deployment and manipulation of resources at the school level, governance mechanisms, capacity building, and school development approaches. All these strategies must be targeted at achieving the policy goal of more inclusive practice in all schools.
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School Choice and Inclusive Education
Curt Dudley-Marling
The reform of public education through the application of principles of free-market capitalism, particularly notions of competition and choice, has long enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States, reflecting trends in other industrialized countries. The basic assumption is that the competitive pressures of the market, instantiated through various forms of school choice and high-stakes accountability, will necessarily lead to more efficient and effective schools while honoring parents’ right to determine what is best for their children. Concurrently, another group of educational reformers, advocating for the rights of students with disabilities, have pushed for the transformation of schools, with the goal of creating spaces congenial to the range of human differences, including disability. The problem is that the basic assumptions that underpin free-market reforms and the principles of inclusion are incompatible. One of the requirements of school choice, for example, is the production and marketing of data based on standardized assessment practices and standardized curricula. This tendency toward standardization in market-oriented schools, saturated with the ideology of normality, is antithetical to the conception of diversity that informs the desire for inclusive schools.
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Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Educational Institutions
Talatu Salihu Ahmadu and Yahya bin Don
Organizational citizenship behavior has recently received much interest as it differentiates between actions in which employees are eager to and not to go beyond their prescribed role requirements in diverse organizations. The claim for organizational effectiveness is generally on the increase, seeing as the world is globalizing. In particular, educational systems are shifting toward an era of reorganization, requiring them to toil in a competitive and complex environment. This makes higher education institutions share a likeness with other organizations as the crucial business of an educational institution is imparting quality knowledge through research, teaching, and the learning process. Several organizations have endeavored to be familiar with and compensate employee citizenship behavior as it is currently being integrated into workers’ assessments owing to indications that organizational behavior contributes greatly to the thriving efficiency of employees as well as school organizational competence. This has made the phrase organizational citizenship behavior no longer exclusively applicable to the business segment. It has become germane with regard to educational institutions and their functionality inthe early 21st century, as there isjust slight dissimilarity between education and business organizations. Bearing this in mind, it then becomes importantthat teachers at higher institutions strive to do meet their responsibilities in form of teacher organizational citizenship behavior in spite of all impediments. Also, school leadership must devise a means of encouraging teachers to do their best to support their schools’ accomplishments.
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Service Learning and Teacher Education
Nadine Petersen, Sarah Gravett, and Sarita Ramsaroop
Although teacher education actively promotes the ideals of social justice and care, finding ways of enculturating student teachers into what these values mean in education remains a challenge. Additionally, the literature abounds with the struggles of teacher educators to prepare student teachers with the knowledge and competencies required for the complex task of teaching. A way to address this is through the inclusion of service learning (SL) in initial teacher education programs. SL, as a form of experiential learning, with reflection at its core, serves as a means of deepening student learning about the practice of social justice and care and as a way of both drawing on, and informing, student teachers’ practical and situational learning of teaching. SL also holds potential for preparing teachers with the competencies required for the 21st century. The research on SL in teacher education draws on theoretical perspectives of experiential learning, democracy education, social transformation, multicultural education, critical reflection, and education for civic responsibility. A limitation is that the literature within developing contexts is underrepresented, limiting access to useful lessons from the research in these contexts and preventing wider theorization in the field.
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School Markets and Educational Inequality in the Republic of Ireland
Kevin Cahill
Educational inequality is a persistent feature on the landscape of Irish educational history, and it remains a significant issue in the early part of the 21st century. There have been significant efforts at school reform in recent decades to intervene in a system that continues to provide significantly different outcomes based on socioeconomic position and background. These differentiated outcomes continue to be exacerbated by structural inequalities in the lives of people as well as by an increasing focus on neoliberal market principles in education. Interschool competition, particularly at the postprimary level, has fueled an ever-increasing marketplace where schools vie for desirable middle-class students through media-published school league tables. Indeed, this competitive landscape is partly constructed by an intense and high stakes race for third level places in Ireland.
Nevertheless, significant policy measures have also been aimed at leveling the playing field and providing opportunities for people in communities that are more marginalized in terms of economic status and educational outcomes. Some of these policy interventions have had some impact in terms of retention in postprimary school, including the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools program; curricular interventions into education such as the Junior Certificate Schools Programme; the Leaving Certificate Applied Programme; and the allocation of additional teaching resources to schools experiencing marginalization. Schemes such as the Higher Education Access Route and the Disability Access Route to Education have also done important work in terms of ameliorating opportunities for students from marginalized economic groups and students with disabilities, respectively. However, there are overarching sociopolitical ideologies that work to maintain educational inequality in Ireland, such as the significant impact of neoliberal choice policies on schools in communities experiencing poverty and educational marginalization. These neoliberal ideas are characterized by increasing focus on outcomes, testing and assessment, school and teacher accountabilities, within-school and between-school competition in terms of admissions policies, and “syphoningoff” high-achieving students (academically, musically, sports, etc.), and they often manifest in blunt instruments such as school league tables. These policies often benefit citizens with wealth and cultural capital who use their position to distance themselves educationally from the complexity and diversity of everyday society in favor of academic and cultural silos that work to reproduce advantage for the elite sectors of society.
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STEM Education, Economic Productivity, and Social Justice
David E. Drew
Just as the factory assembly line replaced the farmer’s plow as the symbol of economic productivity at the beginning of the 19th century, so the computer and its software have replaced the assembly line at the beginning of the 21st century. In the United States, and in countries around the world, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education has moved front and center in national discussions of both productivity and social justice. This article will include (a) a review of how the world of work has changed, with a special focus on the history and impact of digital technology since ca. 1970; (b) lessons from research about K-12 education—elementary, middle school, and secondary education—and about higher education; and (c) research about how to increase access to education, and facilitate achievement, for those who traditionally have been under-represented in STEM education. Rigorous research has demonstrated how psychological and sociological factors (e.g., self-concepts, instructor expectations, and social support) often make the difference between student success and failure. To fully contextualize consideration of STEM education, many advocate broadening STEM to STEAM by including the arts, or the arts and humanities, in building educational programs.
In today’s world a young person who wishes to secure a better life for himself or herself would be well advised to study STEM. Furthermore, a nation that wishes to advance economically, while reducing the gap between the have’s and the have-not’s, should strengthen its STEM education infrastructure.
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Preparation Programs for School Leaders
Bruce G. Barnett and Nathern S.A. Okilwa
For over 50 years, school leadership preparation and development has been a priority in the United States; however, since the turn of the century, school systems, universities, and professional associations around the world have become more interested in developing programs to prepare aspiring school leaders and support newly appointed and experienced principals. This increased global attention to leadership development has arisen because public or government school leaders are being held accountable for improving student learning outcomes for an increasingly diverse set of learners. Because school leadership studies have been dominated by American researchers, global program providers tend to rely on Western perspectives, concepts, and theories, which may not accurately reflect local and national cultural norms and values. As such, calls for expanding research studies in non-Western societies are increasing.
Despite relying on Western-based leadership concepts, leadership preparation programs outside the United States differ substantially. Cultural norms and values, infrastructure support, and social and economic conditions influence the availability and types of programs afforded to aspiring and practicing school leaders. As a result, there is a continuum of leadership development systems that range from: (a) mandatory, highly regulated, and well-resourced comprehensive programs for preservice qualification, induction for newly appointed principals, and in-service for practicing school leaders to (b) non-mandatory, minimally regulated, and moderately resourced programs to determine eligibility for positions and induction to the role to (c) non-mandatory, poorly regulated, and under-resourced programs, which are offered infrequently, require long distance travel, and participants costs are not covered.
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A Critique of Neoliberalism in Higher Education
Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría
Neoliberalism—the prevailing model of capitalist thinking based on the Washington Consensus—has conveyed the idea that a new educational and university model must emerge in order to meet the demands of a global productive system that is radically different from that of just a few decades ago. The overall argument put forward is that the requirements, particularly the managerial and labor force needs of a new economy—already developing within the parameters of globalization and the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs)—cannot be adequately satisfied under the approaches and methods used by a traditional university. Neoliberalism affects the telos of higher education by redefining the very meaning of higher education. It dislocates education by commodifying its intrinsic value and emphasizing directly transferable skills and competencies. Nonmonetary values are marginalized and, with them, the nonmonetary ethos that is essential in sustaining a healthy democratic society.
