The Reconstruction of Education: Quality, Equality and Control

During the early 1980s, the main emphasis in school improvement efforts in most developed nations was a school-based approach. However, in the last half of the 1980s and the early 1990s the emphasis in policy and governance shifted more towards an approach based upon centrally determined quality control.
Although the context has changed, the fundamental issue remains the same: how can governments best promote quality, equality and effectiveness in schooling? If school-based approaches seem slow and unreliable, centrally mandated approaches have equal deficiencies of their own. Typically, they are inclined to rigidify schools through heavy bureaucratic rules and procedures. Yet research has shown that school improvement requires flexibility and extensive staff input and commitment at the school level - qualities that bureaucracy tends to inhibit.
Through the cross-national enquiry comparing education policy in the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Australia and Sweden examined in this edited collection, it is possible to analyse the relative strengths and weaknesses of the means employed by different central, state and local agencies of government to try to ensure quality, equality and control in the provision of education in schools.