This chapter addresses some of the classic problems of historical analysis, focusing on the ways in which the intellectual options that the complex history of the discipline can help historians address the challenges those problems pose. It presents a discussion of the problems of objectivity, bias, and judgment in history. It focuses on historians’ necessarily paradoxical yet coherent conception of their own relationship to history – of which they are, according to the logic of the discipline itself, both students and products. It suggests that postmodern theory about the nature of historical knowledge both recapitulates and deepens this fundamental historicist position. It discusses the standards of evidentiary support and of logical argumentation that historians use to evaluate the plausibility and productivity of historical interpretations. Finally, this chapter explores once again the unique pedagogical usefulness of History as a discipline that is irreducibly and necessarily perspectival, interpretive, and focused on standards of inquiry rather than on the production of actionable outcomes.

This chapter argues for an approach to teaching History rooted in the ethical position foundational to the discipline. That approach is based on respect for our students and for the discipline; in it instructors encounter and learn from their students in the same way that they encounter and learn from historical subjects, and instruction in History, just like research in History, focuses not on controlling outcomes but on engaging in an ethically authentic process. It offers six approaches to instruction that can help build this kind of relationship between instructors and students, and between students and the discipline. These include consulting our students regarding their interests and aims; building instruction around the process of inquiry; making pedagogical use both of the breadth of the discipline and of its complexity, diversity, and epistemological and methodological divisions; focusing on teaching analysis, critical thinking, and interpretation; and bringing students to see their engagement with History not only as a process by which they master specific bodies of knowledge and methods of thinking but also as an open-ended intellectual adventure.

Thanks in part to a fee-free basic education policy, school enrolment in Rwanda has surged. More children, particularly those from poor families, now have access to more years within the public education system. At the same time, completion rates remain low and repetition rates remain high. This chapter looks at the ‘hidden costs’ of fee-free schooling in Rwanda. It pairs policy analysis with qualitative data gathering with children, families, teachers, and local and national decision-makers to consider why completion and transition rates aren’t as high as expected in the context of fee-free school. Findings suggest children continue to contend with a range of school-related costs that impact attendance, performance and completion. Examination fees, afterschool coaching, school feeding and ‘voluntary’ parent–teacher association dues shape children’s full participation in school. These ‘hidden costs’ are a key factor for why children do not complete their schooling. The notion of ‘culture’ or ‘backwards mindset’ as the primary reasons why families may choose not to send their children to school is challenged; instead there may be direct and indirect costs that are not accounted for, even in the context of a policy that appears to align with the Education for All agenda.

This chapter examines how teachers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, overcome economic adversity owing to the high cost of living in urban areas and low official compensation for teachers. Focusing on ten schools in Bishkek, this study investigates the mechanisms employed by teachers, principals, and school administrators across the city to counter a single teacher salary reform introduced in 2011 and maintain the status quo. The study illustrates the endurance of longstanding norms and social hierarchies within the teaching workforce in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. It identifies a number of mechanisms employed by teachers and administrators to overcome their disadvantaged position in the labor market. This includes utilizing agency and drawing on social capital to forge ties between teachers and principals (as well as policymakers) in order to maximize formal earnings and to normalize the practice of unofficial school fee collection from parents. The chapter illustrates ways in which teachers and schools have the capacity to ignore, modify, and altogether undo centrally mandated education reforms.

This chapter takes as its starting point the features identified as critical in understanding the process of educational reform, set out by McLaughlin and Ruby in their review of the case studies in Implementing Educational Reform: Cases and Challenges. These are: the historical and political context; models of implementation; timescale; internal and external actors; communication and discourse. It examines the relationship between structure and culture in promoting successful change in educational systems focusing particularly on the role of external actors in shaping the Scottish Government’s management of change and the tension between the broad curricular intentions and the narrow conception of assessment in upper secondary school. It also examines the extent to which governance reform is capable of enabling sustained cultural change; and the best means of encouraging teachers to develop a sense of agency, not simply the implementers of policy devised by external ‘experts’. It illustrates how educational reform in Scotland is complex, contested territory in which the policy intentions of government are interpreted and mediated through bureaucratic agencies, professional networks and an expanding field of interest and pressure groups.

The need to reform pedagogical practice in Peruvian schools has been on the country’s policy agenda at least since the mid-1990s. Since then, the country has undergone several attempts at reform through curriculum change and various in-service training attempts that relied on top-down implementation models and achieved only partial changes. In 2013, an innovative programme named Soporte Pedagogico (SP) devised a strategy to work on changes from within schools and intervening in several key areas at once. It combined teacher mentoring with training workshops, strategies to strengthen a school’s pedagogical leadership, remedial strategies for students lagging behind and parental involvement for improving learning. In sum, an integral approach to reform pedagogical practice. While implementation and impact evaluations showed great promise in the programme, the Ministry of Education introduced cuts and later dismantled the programme. The story of SP is illustrative of how the political economy of education policy making and reform operates in contexts described as Sysiphean states, whose weak institutions give rise to often erratic policy making processes. The case of SP also speaks about how competing visions of education – technocratic versus pedagogically minded – might clash and work against promising change strategies.

Portugal’s education progress from 2003 to 2015 has been praised as one of the most successful cases in OECD countries. This chapter describes the main factors of this evolution, highlighting policy measures taken on the aftermath of the 1995 TIMSS and 2000 PISA shocks. These policy measures include a more detailed curricular development, the improvement of standard assessment and the disclosure of schools’ results. These changes acted against the background of an experienced teacher body and counted with a discreet, but powerful factor: the reliance on quality textbooks. This chapter describes the recent evolution of textbooks’ role and their part in keeping both stability and improvement in the taught and assessed curriculum. It concludes with an account of how these apparently successful reforms were halted after years of bipartisan support.

This chapter presents a special instance of education reform in which South African students presented a compelling case for curriculum change under decolonization. At first, it appeared that all conditions for successful change were in place – receptive university leadership; compelling educational rationale; pressing political demand; and widespread support among academic teachers. A massive colonial statue was toppled of the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes on the University of Cape Town campus. For a short but powerful moment (2015–2016) academic faculties refocused their energies on critical concepts such as decoloniality, what it might mean and how it could be implemented. Special seminars, invited speakers, funded projects, senate authorizations, and commissioned task teams sprung into action to “decolonize the curriculum.” Five years later, little had changed both for the disciplinary curriculum (e.g., sociology or chemistry) or the institutional curriculum (i.e., the rules and regulations that govern legitimate knowledge). Why? Based on interviews with more than 200 academic teachers across 10 universities, this case study demonstrates how exactly institutions temper radical ideas. This is a specific case of radical reform in a broader struggle to decolonize knowledge from Cape Town and Bristol to Antwerp and South Carolina.

One reason for assembling another collection of essays on examples of how education reforms were implemented is to see if different resource levels and different political and national histories produce and demand different reform strategies. Another is to highlight the tension between rational approaches to education reform and the participatory or democratic approaches which emphasise context and the views of practitioners and stakeholders. A third reason is to highlight some of the assumptions about individual behaviours embedded in the rational and participatory approaches to reform. The ten cases presented here have been chosen and shaped by these three rationales. They also highlight some of the themes drawn from the first set of cases about continuity, consistency and coherence, adding to the stock of knowledge about models and approaches to the design and enactment of reforms including logic models and gradualism.