Thank God for the OECD – Modalities of Expertise in Current Education Policy in Slovakia
Roč.22,č.1(2025)
The Role of Expertise in the Public Sphere in CEE Countries
This study is concerned with identifying specific features of the expertise that forms the basis of the proposed systemic and curricular education reforms in Slovakia. The reforms are set out in Component 7 of Slovakia’s Recovery and Resilience Plan. A bibliographic analysis was performed on the 51 references contained in Component 7 in order to ascertain what type of evidence it is based on. The findings show that much of the evidence is international in character, consisting primarily of data produced and published by the OECD and EU as well as basic quantitative data from large-scale international assessments. These findings contradict those of bibliographic studies on reform expertise in Nordic education, in which the dominant forms were national expertise and expertise based on secondary interpretations of data from international comparisons. Our study shows that the expertise in the reform documents reflects the characteristics of those the expertise is targeted at and the nature of the institutional structures involved in policymaking. These are different in Slovakia, where research and higher education institutes do not form part of an evidence gathering system.
education policy; expertise; Slovakia; Recovery and Resilience Plan; bibliographic analysis; large-scale assessments; OECD
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