Bringing Practitioners Back In

Abstract

Predicting the outcome or success of any public policy is notoriously difficult. Professionals responsible for the development, implementation and evaluation of education policy are faced with the thorny problem of identifying the impact of different education policies upon educational practice. Problems in determining the impact of a policy are compounded by the ways in which the same policy can be implemented in surprisingly different ways in different contexts at the local level. This leads to what Bardach (1977) descibes as an ‘implementation deficit’ where well-intentioned policy reforms fail to be realized in practice. In addition, competing claims made for gains in achievement and educational improvement based on the measurement of the outcomes of an educational policy, can be relatively easy to fabricate in situations where it is not difficult for stakeholders on all sides to ‘game’ a system based upon centrally imposed, crude targets and blunt measures of ‘outcomes’.

Traditionally, the development, implementation and evaluation of educational policy has been based upon a kind of positivist-technocratic policy science which lays claim to neutrality; asserts the ability to separate policy from politics; employs formal ‘scientific’ methods; systematically collects and analyses data; to arrive at what are claimed to be detached policy decisions grounded in science, hard evidence and facts.

However, assumptions that formal scientific knowledge and hard evidence on their own can secure the successful implementation of policy are quite seriously flawed for at least two reasons. Firstly, they are obliged to engage the services of an epistemic imposter which lays claim not only to absolute knowledge but also ownership of the powers of prescient judgment. Secondly, they rely at implementation stage upon a posturing, somewhat overbearing and rather high-maintenance accomplice, ‘command and control’. This chapter contends that our knowledge about issues in the implementation of education policy is acutely under-researched and that policy professionals need to involve the implementors of education policy—education practitioners in the evaluation of policies which aspire to bring about improvements in educational practice. It argues that while technical-rational, positivist approaches to policy development, implementation and evaluation, may at first may appear to be rational and intuitively appealing, they are in the long run unhelpful in bringing about real and sustainable change and educational improvement because they overlook and underestimate the challenges of the ‘implementation deficit’. It concludes that the time has come for policy professionals and practitioners in education to work alongside each other to recognize the importance of local knowledge and lived experience in order to explore what a more democratic-pragmatic-interpretive model of policy development, implementation and evaluation might look like in practice.