Toward a Political Economy of Educational Innovation

Abstract

Many policymakers and researchers still maintain that “modernization” of education through sustained and well-focused investment in educational innovation can improve the quality of education, significantly ameliorate social and economic problems, and lower educational costs as well. By restructuring management and teaching practices, putting more reliance on prepackaged curriculum materials, exploiting the possibilities of computers, radio, and TV, and changing teachers’ roles, it is believed that children and youth would be better prepared to meet the requirements of the modern workplace.

We contend, however, that these benefits have failed to materialize. In an attempt to understand why the promise of educational innovation has not been realized, we critically examine educational innovation, its ideological and paradigmatic underpinnings, and the major stages of the innovation process. Review of a large body of research suggests that conventional theory fails to understand the nature of structural and institutional factors and processes that characterize class-based societies.

A political economy of educational innovation perspective is elaborated that focuses on the centrality of power and the generation of correspondence and contradiction as key analytical concepts. It is argued that this “radical” perspective better explains the failure of innovation. Recent arguments that the central ideas behind educational innovation are still valid, but that greater emphasis must be put on the implementation process and participation of potential adopters, are also critically reviewed and found to represent no substantive shift from the “failed” model of innovation.

Although shortcomings of the radical view are acknowledged and some of its theoretical weaknesses underscored, it demonstrates how the innovation process actively extends and creates a “technological” ideology that is self-legitimating, providing the illusion of change, not its substance. Yet despite the predominance of this reproductive function, we discuss how the radical paradigm also posits that educational innovation yields contradictions and resistances that have the potential for social transformation.