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For two weeks in May 2008, the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) was delighted to host a visit to Canada of Stefan Wolter, Director of the Swiss Coordination Centre for Research in Education, a body co-funded by the federal and cantonal levels of government to ensure the harmonization of education research across Switzerland. In addition to delivering a keynote address at the Campbell Colloquium, and participating in a knowledge mobilization symposium co-sponsored by CCL and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Dr Wolter met with senior government officials and non-government stakeholders in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria, including the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the Canadian Millenium Scholarship Foundation, the Trudeau Foundation, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario and the University Presidents Council of BC. Interviewed two hours before boarding a plane home, Dr Wolter reflected on some of the impressions gleaned from his wide-ranging discussions with Canadian policy-makers, researchers and practitioners in the field of learning.
SW: The Centre was founded in 1971, together with the federal and the cantonal government, which recognized that while education is the responsibility of the cantons, research is largely funded by, and therefore the responsibility of, the federal government. That was the reason the two levels became interested in having a joint institution to map and coordinate research in education.
The Centre was set up to document and create transparency concerning what research in education was producing in Switzerland. It has helped us to identify where there were gaps in our knowledge and where there was redundancy. This is the information on which we base our advice and opinions, and it forms the backbone of the Centre.
Our mandate is essentially four-fold. First, we scout for research. Second, we translate the research into accessible terms. From time to time we chose topics where we assemble all the available research to report on the state of knowledge in a particular domain. A third function - because we are a public institution is to represent Switzerland in national and international bodies. Our Centre enhances the efficiency of the process of representing two federal ministries and 26 cantons. It is more efficient to do that through one institution. The fourth mandate, which is the most recent, is the writing of a comprehensive report on the educational system. This task was given to us because it represents the collection of knowledge that comes from three different sources that we bring together within the Centre: research, statistics and institutional information.
There is no other institution that really combines these three sources of information. It was a natural choice to give us the task of monitoring the progress of the Swiss educational system.
SW: Well, the difference is that evidence-based policy making relies on scientific research, experiments which can be repeated and which have proven to be valid over time and in different settings. With eminence-based policy, on the other hand it is impossible for policy-makers to know what part of an individual’s advice was really research-based when he or she relies on eminence-based “knowledge” – which is really personal judgement, masquerading as evidence.
It is important that policy-makers rely on scientific evidence because they are responsible to the greater public for what they are doing. Policies based on scientific research are not so easy to overturn. Additional substantial evidence is needed to bring it into question, so it also leads to a more rational and stable form of policy-making.
The field of educational policy-making is especially erratic, because it is not based on evidence that allows for this stability. This frequently leads to situations where one reform after the other is implemented in the absence of any evidence that the reform you just embarked on was the right thing to do. Once you see that one reform is not producing the desired results you try another one, and that creates fatigue among the people who have to suffer under the reform and it also leads to a situation where people, in general, get suspicious about any attempts at reform.
SW: Well actually not, in the sense that if evidence is gathered in a rigorous way it usually takes too much time to be able to advise a government ad hoc as to what they should be doing. On the other hand why should they do anything, or why should they change anything, if they do not know whether the current situation is bad or good, or - if they are convinced that the situation needs change – whether the change they propose will do any good?
If evidence-based policy making does not fit the political calendar there is still, in my view, no alternative to it. You can provide the basis for evidence-based policy only on an institutionalized, continuous base if you build up the research infrastructure. This also helps to shorten quite considerably the time it takes to generate the necessary research to answer a policy question.
The problem in the past in Switzerland was that when policy questions about education were raised there was no research base at hand. For a researcher to embark on a new topic we had to build up everything from scratch and that takes a lot of time. When they see that it is no longer relevant they would go on to another topic. If there is not even sustainability in the research community you do not on a continuous basis build up that research capacity. A lot of it is a question of capacity.
SW: Yes, and also to accept that for quite some time researchers will be studying things that probably at the moment are not the hot topics. Governments do not know what tomorrow’s hot topic will be. It’s not always wise to determine research policies only by the policy agenda of today.
It is actually easier for the educational research community to quickly apply methods that are already there but, of course, researchers themselves have to change the way they work and the way they look at things and move out from the historical, ideological, and philosophical driven way of only looking at education.
SW: Yes, I think the need for my research centre is that although there are education departments or institutes in universities, education is not a single disciplinary research domain. Relevant research in education or on education comes from psychology, sociology, economics and political science - in effect, from many fields - so the public or applied context is often question-driven and not discipline-driven.
There needs to be two types of translation: one involves combining research results that come from different disciplines, brought together in my Centre, by CCL or other places where, independent of which discipline is the source of the research finding we use it if it is helpful to address a question, and the second it is—because all the disciplines use their disciplinary vocabulary and jargon— that people who are fluent in more than one disciplinary vocabulary can combine, interpret and evaluate the results.
Very often you do not find these people in the academic sector because there is no pay for doing that. Interdisciplinary research is still at the bottom of all interests in the academic process - and so very often there is no other way of stepping outside the individual disciplines of classical academe.
The public is interested in an answer that can be understood. They do not want this disciplinary jargon that only makes things sound more difficult. They don’t care where the initial results come from.
SW: Yes, humanities embraces the traditional model of one single researcher that is searching for the ultimate truth. Again the public is not interested in the person that finds the result. They are interested in the validity and usefulness of the results. This, of course, runs counter to the eminence-based model in situations in which, because lay people cannot understand the research results, they would rather rely on a single person to tell them the ultimate truth, instead of looking themselves for the truth and having to read through different sources, different languages etc…
If this is not done in a sufficient way by other institutions, this promotes the eminence-based model. The difference between an institution like yours and mine and the eminent source is that Eminence will never reveal its sources. If he or she reveals the sources of his or her knowledge, the eminent status is lost.
It’s interesting that you’ve come to your Centre from an economics background. Is it helpful to bring this more Archimedean perspective to the learning domain?
SW: It may be that an outside view on this issue helps. In your case, with your medical background where this evidence-based movement took root much earlier, and in mine, it is helpful that we are coming from disciplines where the scientific approach and role of evidence was well-established.
Economics is today largely empirically or mathematically or model-based driven, but this hasn’t always been the case. When I was studying economics, it was largely eminence-based, historical, philosophical and ideological thinking issue where a lot of professors were just storytellers. The discipline itself underwent a radical transformation in the 80s around the world.
If people say, oh, the empirical approach doesn’t apply to education I say, yes, that is what some economists were still saying in the 1980s. If education research wants greater validity and academic value it eventually has to go the same way.
SW: First of all it was not clear from the outset that these three questions should be examined independently. We start with effectiveness because effectiveness relates very much to the goals you establish and a lot of what is done in the educational system has to conform to the political goals and the goals the public or decision-makers set for the system.
In order to judge effectiveness you have to analyse the relationship between the goal of a given education policy and how well you attain this goal. Once you have an idea of how well you do in terms of effectiveness, the efficiency question then arises. Even if you reach all your goals, or some of them, the question is do you reach them with the least possible amount of investment or input?
Education also has a responsibility for the efficient use of private resources, for example the time students must spend to reach a certain goal. Time is not only money. Time is also a scarce resource for everybody. If it takes you five years of university to achieve a certain competency that could effectively be reached in four years, well, that would give you one year to tour and travel the world instead of staying at university. No one can say that he or she does not care about the time that he or she has to invest in education.
We know that more people are willing to embark on future or continuous education if they see it as an efficient way of increasing and improving their competencies. The more inefficient the system, the more people decide not to go into education.
We look at equity in terms of how much of the learning outcome is predetermined by your background: whether you were foreign born, a second generation, or whether you are male or female. We want to see that everyone, independent of background, has a fair chance in the system.
If we find that some of these background variables predetermine the educational outcome, we have to question the system and see whether these are institutional factors or other factors which produce these predetermined results. There might still be other reasons, but institutionalized settings contribute to predetermined results then equity clearly will not be achieved.
SW: Yes. We accept that people are different in their learning outcomes, that there can be variation but that variation should not be able to be explained by factors you knew beforehand.
Let’s turn to the Bologna Process and how it enhances educational outcomes according to these three evaluation criteria.
SW: First of all one has to remind people that the Bologna Process is not an EU product; it is a product of the Council of Europe which incorporates many more countries than are members of the European Union. Switzerland is a member of the Council of Europe (Conseil de l’Europe), and so the Bologna Process which was started by the Conseil de l’Europe also encompasses Switzerland. To be outside the Bologna Process would significantly damage the mobility of your own students who would have more difficulty studying abroad for a semester or two and, of course, it would damage your ability to attract foreign students.
Attracting the best and more talented students is what all tertiary or post-secondary systems in the world are trying to do. Either for immigration purposes – in that you expect or hope that people who have been educated within your country would remain – or as a part of your research base. For foreign institutions to be competitive in the world, you need the best and brightest Ph.D. students, wherever they may come from.
The United States of America is a perfect example. They have used this model for quite a long time, which allows them to be at the forefront of research. In many important scientific disciplines, more than 50 per cent of all Ph. D. students in the US did their masters degrees in another country. So there is a fierce battle for the best talent going on around the world, and we are trying to be in a situation where we can compete to attract the best and most mobile students around the world to Switzerland.
SW: Harmonization in this sense in fact leads to two things which militate against standardization. Harmonization leads to common rules of the game and to transparency, which together allow for mobility - and mobility is competition.
It is in systems that are not harmonized and where you have no competition that there are huge variations. You are not aware of these variations because of the lack of harmonization. You have no transparency about the outcomes so you cannot compare them because they are in different contexts, in different institutional settings. This leads to a situation where every producer - may it be a university, a province, a canton or a whole school system - operates effectively in a situation of natural monopoly. Because of this non-harmonization no one can compete with them.
In a natural monopoly, you are more likely to see greater variations of quality than in a system that is more harmonized in its rules of operating. Harmonization in Switzerland, if I relate that to the constitutional reform, is about rules of the game. It’s not about having the same outcomes. We will measure the outcomes because we want to give all people the same opportunity to have access to the same quality of education, and competition will improve the overall quality. Bad systems, bad parts of the system and bad institutions cannot hide anymore behind the smokescreen of “well we have a different situation and this approach is perfectly adapted to our situation, so we cannot do it differently.” That’s the smokescreen all these natural monopolies set up in order not to be evaluated in comparison to others.
SW: The first benefit if you harmonize the rules of the game is that people can be truly mobile within the educational system and within the country. People have seen over the last 20 years that the labour market has become more and more flexible and demands people to be flexible themselves. Differences in the educational system were seen as a big obstacle to the flexibility and mobility of parents and students around the country.
This inflexibility, if we come back to the tertiary system for example, has also been one way to create these natural monopolies. If a student cannot move away from his home town, his university will not feel competitive pressure. All the students in the catchment area of the university will be forced to attend this university. What another university does 100 km away does not affect them.
All the things you do in permitting more mobility and choice is improving the quality. That is what I think the majority of the Swiss people had in mind when they voted for the reform.
SW: Competitiveness today may no longer be true tomorrow. We are living in a world where things change rapidly from one day to the other. I think the large majority of people have come to realize that you cannot rest on the laurels of your achievements.
The other thing is that people have come to realize more and more that today’s competitiveness is the product of the investment not of yesterday but of the last 10, 20 or 30 years. You are competitive because you have that stock of knowledge and wealth.
If you do not worry about competitiveness today, you may not feel it tomorrow but you may feel it in 10 or 20 years time. It will then be too late to make a quick change or adjustment overnight. People are realizing more and more, especially at their place of work, how things quickly change because the Swiss economy is such an open economy, with every second Swiss franc being earned abroad. We are an export-oriented society.
Most of the people experience this in their everyday lives. The concern about competitiveness is something we do not have to specifically explain to people. What has changed perhaps in the past 10 to 20 years is that 20 years ago people believed that competitiveness was very much an issue of how much you invested in your work and how committed you were. Over the last 10 or 20 years they have realized that it is also much about formal education. Parents today are more worried about the educational status of their children, the quality of what they learn in the institutions and the competencies they are attaining - not only when compared to those of the village next door, but also as compared to China, Russia or wherever. They know that their child will be working in competition with the rest of the world.
The recognition of the importance of learning in driving competitiveness is a rather recent thing but that puts a lot of pressure on the educational system. We now demand results which were not so much expected 10 or 20 years ago.
SW: I wouldn’t say that doing only research improves the situation but you have to have a base to start with. It if isn’t broken you don’t have to fix it. If it is broken, research should prevent you from having to make long and costly detours in getting where you want to go. It should help get you there as quickly as possible and with the least possible resources. Otherwise it is just a trial-and-error system.
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