Browsing by Subject "Education policy"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Between abandonment and adoption: the value of E-valu-ation for Turkey's Educational Decision Making
    (2014-06) Cakici, Hanife
    This dissertation examines the value of evaluation for Turkey's educational decision making. Relying on individual interviews and document review, the study analyzes how key stakeholders - government officials, academics, and civil society representatives - and governmental acts envision and portray the role and utility of evaluation for public decision making specifically in the education sector. Drawing on social science literature from the fields of evaluation, comparative education, public policy, and international development, this study addresses the need to decolonize the concept and practice of evaluation, as this trans-disciplinary field is rapidly cutting across geographic, historic, social, and cultural borders. This study revisits the origins of evaluation practice in the global Northern context, traces its expansion into the global South across a number of sites, and argues that context matters in transferring, borrowing, negotiating, establishing, practicing, and using the concept and practice of evaluation. Evidence for this study's conclusions comes from Turkey's relatively immature history with evaluation in the education decision domain. Motivated by the desire to become one of the top ten largest economies in the world by 2023, Turkey's rapid development underlined educational achievement and growth as the roadmap. This quest necessitated a specific form of educational governance and decision making driven by the principles of effectiveness and efficiency. At the heart of these principles, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) has long lain as a tool of accountability, learning, and improvement, in which Turkey's entire public administrative culture has historically lagged behind. In response to this immaturity, supranational authorities and international donors have provided financial and technical impetus for locating M&E systems, practice, and information in the Turkish education decision domain. Coupled with the country's official drive for modernization, international actors, to a great extent, paved the way to legal arrangements for streamlining evaluation. Specifically, the Green Paper published after the European Union's "Strengthening the Capacity of the Ministry of National Education Project" later became the conceptual foundation for Decree No. 652 that helped establish M&E units at the Ministry for the first time in Turkey's educational history. Despite all these efforts, the study reveals that evaluation remains as a new concept that is closely associated with quantification, performance-based budgeting, and compliance. Evaluation's value mostly resides in its symbolic representation of modern norms of governance to which Turkey eagerly wants to commit. Yet, reported confusion about what evaluation really entails, as a concept and as a field of practice, is paired with highly centralized and politically polarized educational governance, all together situating evaluation in foster care in Turkey: it is neither fully adopted, nor is it completely abandoned. Adopting a constructivist-critical outlook on the role of evaluation in the global South, this study endeavors to locate this field of practice in the broader context of international development with its negotiated margins, borders, and struggles. By suggesting that evaluation is a marker of a country's quest to modernize and Westernize, this study sheds light on the direction of cross-cultural expansion of the field of evaluation.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A case study of academic growth in schools for the deaf: the convergence of educational policy and organizational theory
    (2013-12) Virnig, Sean M.
    In this age of educational accountability, public schools are presumed to have the innate organizational capability to meet academic achievement benchmarks. Fair or not, this presumption also extends to schools serving students who are deaf, a population whose academic achievement continues to be unsatisfactory. This dissertation investigated how schools for the deaf have organized to achieve academic growth, which is generally defined as the measure of a student's progress between two or more points in time. Three schools for the deaf that demonstrated the most evident academic growth were selected through a purposive sampling of a computer-based adaptive assessment that represented 28 schools for the deaf. Interview data were collected from the three schools using semi-structured protocols that were then analyzed using the constant comparative method. The following organizational actions were taken by these schools: (1) owning the national problem of unsatisfactory academic achievement of students who are deaf, (2) responding to the problem with an academic growth model, (3) striving for academic growth through data-driven engagement among teachers and students and (4) shifting internal resources to support academic growth. Emergent patterns of goals, data and growth each reinforced and then expanded the guiding framework of this dissertation, routinized action theory. This dissertation may provide a template for schools for the deaf and any other schools operating in a turbulent policy environment to organize toward a more satisfactory student academic achievement.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Epistemologies and Enactments of Self-Determination in South Dakota
    (2024-06) Menter, Abby
    In the State of South Dakota, and across the so-called United States in general, political forces continue to attempt to control Indigenous identity, land relationships, and power, despite the characterization of the current policy era as one of Tribal Self-Determination. This critical ethnographic study examines the ways in which these policies are felt and experienced as acts of coloniality and continued attempts at racial and cultural erasure. Epistemologies of decoloniality, however, serve as sources of resistance to hegemonic state violence. The findings of this study explore the main epistemic frames that educators and other education stakeholders use to situate their opposition to coloniality, thereby creating a vision for self-determination that is distinct from that of the federal government. In this study, three main themes emerged as ways in which educators and education stakeholders epistemically de-link from colonial constructions of Indigenous education, each of which forms a unique pedagogical perspective that guides both theory and practice. These pedagogies, of relationality, of resistance, and of sustenance, act as the ways in which some educators establish counter-hegemonic discourses, practices, and outcomes in their work.