Central European University A Program for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University

  EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND REFORM: CONNECTING POLICY AND RESEARCH

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July 5 - 16, 1999

Thomas B. Timar (University of California, Riverside)
Gábor Halász (Director, Office of Research, Hungarian National Institute of Education)

Resource Persons:

Dr. Michael Kirst (Professor, Stanford University)
Pavel Zgaga (State Secretary, Slovenia)

Course Description
This course on educational policy focuses on current problems in elementary and secondary education. The course has a dual focus: to present current public policy research methodology through discussion and actual research of a current issues in public pre-collegiate education and to build a body of knowledge among academics and policy makers in the region regarding research and policy formulation. It is the intention of this course to bring together policy research and practice.  The primary intention of the course is to familiarize participants with the fundamentals of educational policy analysis and policy evaluation.

The resource personnel for the course, who will participate in the seminars, enjoy exceptional scholarly reputations and have considerable experience working with policy makers.
- Gábor Halász is head of the Research Department at the National Institute for Public Education in Hungary. He has an extensive background in educational policy research, particularly in comparative education research. Much of his research is in collaboration with policy researchers in other countries, so he has an excellent understanding of cross-national issues.
- Michael Kirst is regarded as the leading expert in the United States and abroad on educational politics and policy. He is a member of the American Academy of Education as well as the National Academy of Science. His work on issues of educational reform has greatly influenced policy making in the United States. He is a principal researcher with the national Center for Policy Research in Education. He was formerly president of the California State Board of Education. He is an educational consultant for numerous national organizations.
- Pavel Zgaga served as Deputy Minister of  Education and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. In January 1993, he was appointed to be State Sec-retary.  Since February 1994 he is also a member of the Council  for higher education. His professional and research interests are in the area of social philoso-phy and philosophy of education. He has authored and co-edited several monographs on educational reform.  He is also professor at the University of Lubliana.
- Thomas Timar is Associate Professor of Educational Policy and Leadership at the University of California, Riverside. He has written extensively on educational reform issues, and most recently he has completed a large study for the US National Science Foundation on the mathematics and science reform.  He has also taught at Harvard University and was a research associate on law and education at Stanford University.  Prior to his work in academia, he has served as consultant to the California State Legislature and was director of a  policy center that assisted state policy makers on educational issues. In addition to his writing on issues of educational governance and reform, he has extensive experience in policy evaluation.

The course is organized around a study of the changes that have occurred in elementary and secondary education in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Central Asia over the past seven years and  the effects of those changes.

Major areas of study for the course include the following:
- finance of public education—how has it changed, have funding priorities shifted
- participation rates by types of schools: technical and trade school, gymnasium
- curriculum: what is taught and where are decisions about such things made
- administration: what is the background of administrators, how are they trained  and            selected
- teachers: training, compensation, professionalization, authority and control;
- governance: where is control over education vested, decentralization vs. centralization,         concentration vs. dispersion

Program participants must prepare a paper by June 1 that assesses changes in public education in their respective countries on these dimensions. These papers will serve as the basis for class discussions along with a set of assigned readings. The readings will include theoretical works drawn mainly from the literature on educational policy. They will also include some case studies of reform efforts in various countries. Readings will be made available to students prior to the start of class.

The first week of the course will focus more heavily on policy strategies: how policy problems can be defined and how problem definition relates to policy solution. We also discuss how various policy dimensions interact with one another. For instance, if policy makers opt for decentralized governance systems, what are the implications of that on equity, finance, curriculum, and teaching? In the first week, discussion will also focus on analysis of the problems, how to frame  issues within the discourse of public policy. We also explore the potential social, political, economic, and cultural impacts of changes in educational systems. The course also examines the role of policy evaluation.

The second week focuses on students’ case studies and students will apply the analytic frameworks developed in the first week to those studies. Class discussion will focus first on collection of data, problems and constraints in obtaining it, what further data is needed to better understand the dynamics of change.

The overall objective of the course is to help students develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between educational issues and problems, policy development, and the institutional structures needed to support those policies. It is also intended to strengthen students’ skills in analyzing policy arguments (pulling apart assumptions, assessing evidence) in order to construct a persuasive policy analysis.  The course consists of 10 seminar-workshop meetings. Students will meet for four hours daily for the two-week period. For the first week, it is expected that students will discuss their case studies. Given the number of  expected participants, that ought to take much of the first week. Students will have been expected to complete readings from the above list of books and articles. In addition, there will be some directed reading, however, the seminars are intended to focus on the case studies and the development of policy analytic frameworks to explain them. The second week is intended to move students from discussion of the case studies to the development of conceptual models for policy analysis and development. In 20 hours of seminar-workshop meetings, students will be guided to develop different policy models from their case studies.

Class meetings are intended to be interactive with the purpose of maximizing interaction between instructors and students.