Problematizing K-12 “Best Practices” in the gulf cooperation council region

Foucault’s thoughts on problematization

Foucault never systemically delineated what a problematization analysis entails. Nevertheless, researchers from assorted disciplines have endeavored to identify critical characteristics of problematization analysis (e.g., Borch, 2016; Lopdrup-Hjorth, 2013). For instance, Borch (2016) outlines four essential features of a problematization analysis worth discussing. First, he addresses the meaning of “problematization” and argues that the definition of problematization might easily lend itself to misunderstanding. He notes that problematization does not simply pinpoint phenomena that seem unfair, unjust, and stigmatizing. Instead, Borch (2016) suggests that problematization investigates how a phenomenon is ra specific historical context and the possible responses offered to address it. Pickup (2017) writes that problematization includes a nominal and verbal form “in which practices, discourses, and historical responses to difficulties are themselves objects of inquiry, in the nominal sense, while ‘problematizing,’ in the verbal sense, is the act of historicizing these practices as part of critical inquiry into the present” (p. 88). Borch’s second feature of problematizing is how a problematization analysis is developed and provides meaning and shape. Problematization centers on questions of power and knowledge addressed through scientific knowledge, moral reflection, and political analysis. In a Foucauldian sense, knowledge is manifested in truth, while power is established through governing.

According to Foucault (2008), on the one hand, power is established in knowledge and is extended by using knowledge. On the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it according to its unidentified objectives. This entails paying attention to the forms of power and knowledge interrelated with the educational best practice discourse. This power is based on evidence-based knowledge, reproducing knowledge in different contexts for covert intentions (Hannon, 2008; Hollway, 2001). The third aspect of problematization analysis requires engaging in a specific historical study type (Borch, 2016). This essay pays little attention to the ebbs and flows of educational statistics, which are other ways of exploring the impact of implementing best practices discourse in educational institutions.

Perry and Tor (2008) suggest that problematizing how educational best practice models became highly rationalized, explicit, consensus, institutionalized, and serve as a legitimate framework for regulating national and local education policy formulation and practical action. More importantly, Merino (2014) suggests that Foucault’s investigations of history aid in understanding what happened in the past and produced events in the present. Problematizing allows one to examine past thinking to comprehend current conditions, which is the starting point of problematization. Webb (2014) points out that the distinctiveness of problematization is identifying the circumstances that create problems and solutions.

Finally, the fourth feature of a problematization analysis necessitates focussing on the challenges at a given time and recommending suitable responses (Borch, 2016). In Foucault’s own words, problematization analysis is “a question of a movement of critical analysis in which one tries to see how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed; but also, how these different solutions result from a specific form of problematization” (Foucault, 1994: p. 421). As Bacchi (2016) points out, policy analysis emphasizes problems as acknowledged problematic conditions to problematizations, or how problems are established, given structure and meaning within policies.

Conceptualizing best practices in education

Problematizing best practices requires situating them within a historical context addressing how they have become a regular part of education. However, to understand best practices, it is essential to consider the concept of globalization, educational borrowing, and the best practices embedded in the globalization process (Ruby and Li, 2020). Portnoi (2016) contends that, as an empirical fact, globalization encompasses a set of practices that have made the world more economically, politically, socially, and culturally interdependent. This interdependency has produced fertile soil for the current educational policy borrowing activities. At this point, it is worth defining educational borrowing as defining and redefining educational policies in the light of reforms that fail to accomplish desired and hoped for educational goals (Batra, 2018). Bennett (1997) defines policy borrowing as incorporating outside effects to adjust local policy by integrating policies from various countries. Kandel (1961) discussed policy borrowing to develop new independent countries from “their almost primitive level to the civilization of the twentieth century” (p. 134).

The term globalization did not appear until the 1960s, but borrowing education policy records dates back to the 1800s (Portnoi, 2016). Early policy borrowing initiatives had government representatives traveling to various countries, examining and learning from their educational systems, and then introducing this new knowledge and practice structures or practices back home (Portnoi, 2016). Until the late in ess, comparative and international education (CIE) became a separate study area, indicating the interest and concern for globalization and educational borrowing. Early field scholars were entangled with colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century and neo-colonialism after the Cold War (Takayama et al., 2016).

Post-WWII, Portnoi (2106) argues that policy borrowing slowly evolved over prolonged history, intensifying because of globalization, neoliberal economic policies that led to a surge in competition, and the formation of post-WWII global governance institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that serve as organizations of aid and development. These institutions enabled an increased exchange of thoughts and practices in all realms, especially education, which has remained a key element in educational borrowing and sharing best practices.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a normative approach that ties education to economic growth, social change, and political development crystallized (Silova, 2012). This normative approach was set in motion by policymakers and practitioners, fuelled by global education and economic competitiveness, and energized by the widespread availability of empirical educational data. This trinity of new players, new drives, and new educational information led to (1) the formulation of new rationalities and norms in education, (2) the redefinition of what constituted authority in educational spheres, and hence (3) the emergence of educational “experts,” as the coming sections further explain. Globalization emerged as an ideology littered with neoliberal tenets acting like a substitution for the Global North’s dominance of the Global South (Takayama et al., 2016). Hence, building educational systems in the Global South required, as Kandel (1961) posits, a sweeping change in education, a departure from traditional norms and practices, and “a leap from primitive to modern cultures” (p. 131).

As the Cold War progressed, borrowing educational best practices intensified. Noah and Eckstein (1969) noticed that the US enthusiastically studied best practices to confirm its global educational competitiveness while simultaneously pursuing additional national strategic interests, often at the cost of the less fortunate. Similar concerns started to crystalize in international governance and development agencies who endorsed education borrowing as a practical means to identify and transfer best practices from “developed” to “less developed” environments. That is, from the Global North to the Global South. Revolving around global competitiveness and help ideology (Gronemeyer, 1992), the best practices search became one of the Western governments' and international development agencies' main goals.

By the 1970s and 1980s, educational borrowing took a scientific turn (Silova, 2012). Western national governments and international development agencies, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations Development Bank (UNDB), required researchers to provide descriptive accounts of educational best practices and present their accounts through empirical methods and techniques of the social sciences. Researchers were required to produce systematic, controlled, comparative, and empirical data that indicated the effectiveness of these practices. This supported the pragmatic and practice approach to educational borrowing (Silova, 2012).

As globalization increased, a surge in education borrowing increased worldwide (Tooley, 2001). The scientific shift in previous decades of using statistical tools and quantitative coding data was evident in research initiated by the OECD (Silova, 2012). Wiseman et al. (2010) argue that international testing, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), are “ubiquitous components of educational decision-making processes at the local as well as national policy levels” (6). This availability of internationally comparative educational information profoundly affected educational policymaking and governance worldwide by escalating policy borrowing and model transfer and seeking best practices delivering internationally comparative benchmarks used for educational and economic development (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; Wiseman et al. (2010).

This new policy borrowing environment led to the widespread use of best practices in educational systems worldwide. Aside from the historical evolution of this phenomenon and its economic, political and socio-cultural underpinnings, many countries have embraced educational policy borrowing to emulate the successes of other nations regarded as global references (Volante and Klinger, 2022).

Starting in the 1990s and 2000s, the GCC region was confronted by capital, labour flows, and various political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept the region. As a result, the region was more rapidly integrated into the global economy than other regions. Efforts to construct knowledge-based economies led to the increasing transfer of Western educational reforms (Romanowski and Du, 2020). They looked for the “silver bullet” that guarantees development in the educational, political, and economic sectors, which led to borrowing what were perceived to be best practices. As previously mentioned, the scientific turn in educational borrowing led to the forging of a new educational identity and re-establishing of what constituted authority and expertise in the educational field.

With this shift, the field became accessible to anyone who claimed expertise in scientific methods and professional areas of educational sciences. If equipped with the required scientific knowledge, any expert in any area of educational sciences could be quickly transported anywhere in the world, ready to diagnose problems and develop solutions through professional consultation Silova, 2012). By this logic, experts assumed the responsibility of identifying educational problems, scientifically analysing them, and efficiently providing solutions through the implementation of best practices.

Experts could then generate “dependable knowledge” that could be easily synthesized into annual policy documents, released worldwide, and duplicated locally. As such, experts gained the power to define what is considered best for a given society and the ability to speak for those who supposedly lacked expert knowledge to help themselves. Given the technological advances and the world's interconnectedness, policymakers have numerous ways to learn about educational advances and improvements, rendering policy borrowing commonplace in the policymaking process (Portion, 2016).

Ochs and Phillips (2004) point out that most discussions of educational borrowing reflect a naivety of the many assumptions from moving a practice from one context to another. This is evident when in policy borrowing, the distinction between research that tends to produce complex and conditional interpretations and advocacy aimed at finding immediate solutions (i.e., "what works") to influence policy development (Majone, 1989). Consequently, the emphasis shifted from understanding the complexity of local frameworks within which educational borrowing occurred to transfer based on evidence from other contexts. In short, researchers were obligated to act upon – as opposed to understanding – the educational world. This leads to the current course of action in borrowing, which translates complex conditions into simple solutions.

The power and legitimacy of best practices

With new policy initiatives legitimized (Greening, 2017), different borrowing models have been increasingly espoused in many countries and world regions, with notable examples not only from West to East but also East to West, resulting in heated education reform debates (You, 2020). A problematizing analysis requires inquiry into how the knowledge, implementation, management, and evaluation of best practices have amassed power and legitimacy. One way is that best practices gain legitimacy from practical experience. Bernstein and Van der Ven (2017) argue that because best practices are already in-practice, they are often perceived as legitimate because they are feasible and provide a bridge between abstract and practice. Furthermore, their authority and legitimacy are based on the acknowledgment these practices are already successful in another context, providing a plan for others to follow (Bernstein and Van der Ven, 2017).

Another way best practices secure legitimacy is in the appearance of consensus assembled from the experiences of practitioners. Again, Bernstein and Van der Ven (2017) suggest that this consensus provides best practices with a sense of being objective and apolitical, even if members of the group contributing to best practices share political agendas, eliminate dissent, or selectively defend normatively favorable outcomes over others. Although consensus necessary for the legitimacy of best practices should be established through participatory and deliberative procedures, this type of consensus is merely an appearance of agreement. Therefore, these best practices signify consensus on the best existing practices, not practices that ought or might be considered.

Finally, Swan et al. (2000) suggest best practices are based on the belief that companies within the same industry share similar practices. Those companies that perform best serve as a benchmark for the other companies. In education borrowing, Steiner-Khamsi (2013) terms this “comparison against standards,” suggesting that this has gained unprecedented popularity over the past few years. She argues that standardized comparison signifies the method of inquiry that is most narrow and standardized and least perceptive to context, culture, or system. For example, the education systems of countries that perform well on international tests like PISA, such as Finland, are emulated without much consideration of the local culture.

This raises two critical issues; how can a country justify borrowing best practices developed and used in a system entirely different from their own? and is the justification given rational and legitimate. Steiner-Khamsi (2013) suggests that regarding legitimacy, best practices are reframed in a way that denies policy borrowing occurred by using identical measurements that makes systems look analogous. At the same time, these practices need to be universal enough to be applied in various global contexts. For this reason, groups that disseminate best practices tend to focus on replicable and versatile processes sufficient to apply to multiple contexts (Bernstein and Van der Ven, 2017). This leads to a false universalism, explained in greater detail below, suggesting best practices will work in another cultural context, providing legitimacy. With that in mind, borrowing best practices presents several challenges that GCC countries must face. These are addressed below.

Challenges of best practices in the GCC region

There are certainly challenges when adopting best practices. In what follows, we problematize this urge for educational borrowing and the use of best practices in the GCC region, centring our discussion on five main themes: (1) educational transferring and profit-making, (2) false universalism, (3) leapfrogging, (4) language and meaning, and (5) the fidelity of implementation.

Educational transfer and profit making

Worldwide, the rise of the global education industry (GEI) signifies novel forms of private and profit-driven involvement in education (Tooley, 2001). Against the background of the recent and current state of world economies, marketing has become the hallmark of modern neoliberal education systems across the globe (Gray et al., 2018; Hastings, 2019). An extensive assortment of for-profit educational services are produced, exchanged, and consumed through supranational interactions. For Vergera et al. (2017), the GEI is based on increased demand for private schools, corporate universities, and different systems of “educational provisions such as e-learning, test preparation services, edu-marketing, student recruitment services, supplemental education services, certification services and teacher training” (p. 327).

Global education industry is a lucrative business where countries reap significant profits by exporting education policies and practices. The US, UK, Australia, and Canada are the world leaders in exporting education services. Maslen (2012) points out that education exports play a central role in Australia’s economic prosperity. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported a record high of AUD 13.14 billion in international education exports for the 2014/15 fiscal year, a 14% increase from the previous year (ICEF Monitor, 2015). Global education exports are Australia's fourth-largest export industry. Education exports are worth USD 26 billion in the UK (O'Malley, 2019).

The GEI compares one “successful” education situation to another. It then prescribes solutions to sell products to improve the other education system (Mohamed and Morris, 2019), as in, for example, using PISA scores as a tool to determine a nation’s needs and then offering to sell the solution, creating market opportunities for a country or related organization (Spring, 2015). These solutions often include hiring consultancy firms and education businesses and building public–private partnerships. The outcome is a set of commercial transactions marketed to meet the receiving culture’s needs (Ellili-Cherif et al., 2011). The GEI centers on financial gain, and earning profit is a crucial motivation for most education policies and practices (Altbach and Knight, 2007). To a certain extent, these commercial interests by non-state actors and consultancy companies have escaped researchers’ attention (Holden, 2009).

Still, few researchers have criticized consultancy companies. For instance, McKenna (2006) notes that consultants brought outside expert knowledge by being capable of mastering, manipulating, and extending new realms of complex knowledge. In a similar vein, Al-Tikriti (2010) argues that educational companies with profit motives could determine a nation’s education agenda and threaten indigenous knowledge, slowly eradicating the nation's collective memory and cultural norms. Bennett (2015) speaks of the discursive mechanisms that “reinforce the hegemony of EAD [English Academic Discourse] and, by extension, the empiricist paradigm, through quality control and, crucially, resource allocation procedures” (p. 11). She states that Western dominance entails a “silencing of other scholarly discourses (and, by extension, other theories of knowledge)” and warns that “if left unchecked, it may ultimately result in the elimination of epistemological diversity and its replacement a monoculture of global proportions” (p. 11).

Hence, it is safe to argue that what might be considered a financial gain for GEI’s vendors can be seen as a collective loss regarding the vendees’ ability to maintain their indigenous direction. This does not mean that educational borrowing is utterly useless. Instead, economic logic implies that calculating the value of educational borrowing should involve indigenous assets and lead to a profit statement that indicates the revenues, costs, and expenses incurred by borrowing educational systems.

False universalism

In a globalized era, the project of advancing a single, worldwide human community has intensified, playing a significant role in shaping the fallacy of universal best practices. In light of this essay, it is crucial to consider the ill-informed notion of a universalism inherent in transferring educational best practices (Romanowski et al., 2018; Rose, 1991). In contemporary educational policies and practices, especially in the Global South, there is an assumption that a practice that spawns respectable results in one context will unproblematically produce comparable outcomes in another. This assumption decontextualizes the many dimensions of educational practices, alienating grammarthat these practices were established with different educational and cultural values (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). Universalism suggests that best practices will, in principle, work in any cultural context. However, transferred practices encounter contextual challenges and cross-cultural differences that are crucial in implementing best practices (O’Donnell, 2008).

Let us take, for example, the East Asian learner paradox. Chee Mok (2006) explains this as the contradiction between East Asia’s teacher-dominated learning setting, which many consider non-conducive to learning, and East Asian students’ excellent academic performance in comparative studies. East Asian classrooms give an impression of large classes of students sitting rows in at desks facing the teacher and the teachers doing the majority of talking to restrained students (Fang and Gopinathan, 2009). From a Western perspective, this makes the teacher a “purveyor of authoritarian information” (Stevenson and Stigler, 1992: p. 188), transporting knowledge to submissive receivers who learn by rote memorization.

These classrooms stand in sharp contrast to student-centred Western classrooms advocated by academics to be conducive to learning. Western classrooms contain teachers who assume the role of facilitators while students actively join in group work that nurtures communicative skills, higher-order thinking, and collaboration (Fang and Gopinathan, 2009). Yet, evidence shows that students from East Asian learning environments consistently perform better in large-scale international tests (e.g., the IEA) than students in most Western countries (Fang and Gopinathan, 2009).

Similarly, Hofstede (1993) suggested that there has been a reliance on US-developed management theories over the past 30 years. However, in other parts of the world, the concept of management and the practices and underpinning theories in education may considerably diverge from what has been understood as usual and desirable in a US context. These different conceptions of leadership and leaders display behaviors and traits that vary widely across cultures (Hartog et al., 1999). For example, Hartog et al. (1999) suggested that an authoritarian leadership style might be accepted and preferred in one culture, while a more nurturing leadership style might be interpreted as weak. House et al. (1999) added that the expectations and practices of leaders and their status and authority vary because of the context’s cultural forces in which the leader is embedded.

Hence, false universalism avoids questioning the universal applicability and generalizability of constructs and assumptions embedded in a particular best practice. It omits any consideration that the cultural biases inherent in a specific discipline would carry assumptions not common to all cultures worldwide. Practices originating in Western cultures might not reach their full potential. They can prove counter-productive when transferred to a country with different cultural makeup, thus contributing little to the improvement of education. This false universalism is baked into the transfer process, eradicating all educational practices' distinctive and influential social and cultural dimensions.

Language and discourse

Often, best practices are defined and developed in Western contexts, and when transferred to non-Western contexts, the meanings and understandings can change, become lost in translation, and be flawed when applied. Therefore, it is helpful to consider best practices to problematize this concern as a form of discourse. Discourse is socially constructed and situated leading to subjective and contextually bound meanings (Gee, 2004; Maschler and Schiffrin, 2015; Thompson, 2021).). This allows for flexibility in discourses. Factors outside the formation of discourse always enable the meaning to change (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). The term floating signifier refers to this flexibility. Floating signifiers contain an abundance of meanings because they are expressed differently within different discourses (Torfing, 1999). Chandler (2007) defines a floating signifier as being associated with “a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or nonexistent signified. Such signifiers mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signified; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean" (p. 78).

Western products written and developed in English and transported into the local language may not be readily translatable. They could create a “constructive ambiguity,” allowing local actors to modify their meaning to adapt to local circumstances (Crespy and Vanheuverzwijn, 2019). Best practices that are borrowed and translated may result in ambiguous, ambivalent, or misinformed meanings (Sellami et al., 2019), where the meanings of educational practices are lodged somewhere between different contexts; for example, Romanowski (2013) argues that the transfer of professional accreditation standards that include terms such as social justice or equity is a site of struggle with different views, beliefs, values, and understandings coupled with challenges of determining meaning, and frequently floating or fluctuating from contexts to resulting in different results. Thus, what best practices are intended may not occur during implementation, which is discussed next.

Moreover, importing best practices from a Western to a non-Western context could lead to new “linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural demands and connotations’’ demands. Borrowers may be required to use and understand standard English, leading to a linguistic hegemony in which English becomes imperative mainly for its instrumental value. Prioritizing English can be understood as creating a barrier to knowledge dissemination and threatening the viability of indigenous language(s). Cameron (2001) argues that the risk of the distribution of communicative norms and genres includes a one-way stream of expert knowledge from dominant to lower-ranking cultures.

The fidelity of implementation

As previously discussed, when best practices are being applied in a new setting, it is essential to contemplate that these procedures and practices are open to differing interpretations by practitioners. It can be inferred that there could be differences in implementation. This is termed the fidelity of implementation, or the degree to which an education program or policy approach is implemented compared to the original policy’s purpose and design, is essential (Bauer and Kenton, 2005). The goal of the fidelity of implementation is to reduce any distortions during the implementation process as it proceeds from the decision-making to enactment. Depending on the setting, a difference between the original works or differences can be magnified and play a more significant role in the implementation’s fidelity.

Dusenbury et al. (2003) addressed the fidelity of implementation by discussing three implementation patterns. These are (1) cooptation or adapting the program without any changes, (2) mutual adaptation adapting with some changes, and (3) non-implementation and non-adoption in which neither happened. Cho (1998) suggests that there are “two polarized perspectives: fidelity of implementation and adaptive implementation” (1). At the same time, Cho (1998) discusses the fidelity perspective and the mutual adaptation to fit the new setting’s practice “by reducing the gap between an ideal implementation goal given local contexts” (3). The issue remains that any modifications could threaten the best practice’s theoretical basis and possibly result in adverse outcomes. Finally, Dolowitz and Marsh (2000) suggest a transfer continuum between successful transfers and inappropriate, uninformed, or incomplete transfers.

An example can be Qatar’s educational reform, Education for a New Era, initiated in 2003. Based on RAND Corporation’s analysis and recommendation, Qatar entered a decentralized reform (Brewer et al., 2007). The choice of a charter school model embraced four pillars, autonomy, variety, selection, and accountability. The implementation of the decentralized shifts authority from a centralized education system to local governments or schools (Kirk, 2013). Although Qatar’s reform spawned numerous changes in the country, most were top-down and implemented into a centralized school system without much deliberation for the constraints of the local context (Aydarova, 2017), encountering several “cultural restraints” (Romanowski and Du, 2020). This is one reason that some countries reject decentralization and recentralize public education (Yazdi, 2013), which is the case in Qatar, where the reform has been recentralized (Abou-El-Kheir 2017; Romanowski and Du, 2020).

There is a quandary embedded in using borrowed best practices and policies and concerns about implementation's fidelity. O’Donnell (2008) suggested that a dichotomy exists between the fidelity of implementation and reinvention and adaptation of transferred educational processes. For transferred practices and policies to be effective, implemented, and used as intended by the developers, local modifications, or adaptions must be tolerable to a specific point of radical alterations that compromise the program's integrity and effectiveness (Hall and Loucks, 1978). However, Hannon (2008) suggests that there is always the inevitable challenge of adaptation to context. She asks, “How far can or should fidelity to the original model be modified to fit different circumstances without throwing the baby out with the bathwater?” (p. 78). Cho (1998) raises the concern that implementation should abandon the fidelity of implementation and possibly create a new construct.